Mr. In-Between (24 page)

‘Don't be a prick,' Andy said.

‘Oh, come on,' Jon taunted, awaiting a response, ‘cocaine makes me feel sharp as a pin. Is this the best you can do?'

Andy looked at him. ‘They told me about you.'

‘Did they now? And what was it they told you?'

‘About Rickets. About what you did to Rickets.'

Jon barked a harsh laugh. He capitalised on the moment and leaned forward, marking a tiny increment between thumb and forefinger. ‘Tip of the fucking iceberg, mate. That was something I did on my day off because I felt like it. Have you seen Olly's face? Same thing. I cut him open with this—hang on.' He reached into a pocket and withdrew the stiletto knife. He opened it centimetres from Andy's face. Andy did not flinch. ‘They didn't tell you all about me because if they tried they'd still be telling. There's things they know about, things they've heard about, things they've heard rumoured, and there's things they couldn't begin to imagine. And that wouldn't be the half of it. I could tell them a tenth of what I've done and it would be enough to make them slit their own throats if I asked them, rather than risk pissing me off. Why do you think hard man Olly stood meek as a lamb in the hallway when I asked him to, when he's got his little popgun strung beneath his sweaty armpit?' He drew again on the cigarette. ‘And if we stood and walked to the kitchen now, Andy, what do you think they'd be doing? Do you think they've run away into the night? Do you think they're huddled over the table talking about how to deal with me?' He poured lukewarm beer down his gullet, belched. ‘No,' he said. ‘I'll lay you a wager any size you want that they're sat next to one another drinking mugs of tea and watching Canadian ice hockey, even if they feel like doing neither.' He stood. ‘Well? Do you want to go and check?'

Andy held out his hand. ‘Give me that beer.'

Jon crossed his fingers and stepped forward. He handed Andy the can, from which he proceeded to glug. When he had done he said, ‘What do you want? Do you want me to be scared of you as well?'

‘No,' said Jon.

‘Good,' said Andy. ‘Because remember that I was there when you tried to ask Theresa Burton to the fourth-year disco. Remember that?'

Jon remembered that. ‘I don't want you to be scared of me,' he said. All the same, he hoped that Olly and Gibbon weren't listening.

‘Just as well,' said Andy. ‘Because I'm fucking not.'

‘But I do want you to trust me,' Jon continued. ‘Not them in the kitchen. Not the Tattooed Man.'

Andy rolled his eyes. ‘You can use his name, Jon. It's not like I don't know his name. He's been round more than once to watch the boxing.'

‘I don't care about his name,' spat Jon, with urgent vehemence. ‘He's got so many fucking names I doubt if he can remember which was first, or which is his favourite. And I don't care about how many times he's been round for fucking tea and biscuits.'

He was lying. That, in a way, was precisely what he cared about.

‘All right,' said Andy. ‘Keep your shirt on. Give me a cigarette.' Jon obliged, kneeling at Andy's armchair. As Andy's head bowed to meet the flame, Jon repeated, ‘All I want is for you to trust me.'

‘He says not to trust anyone and I think I agree with him.'

‘Who says? Who says that?'

‘He does,' said Andy. ‘Bill.' He put on a nasal, mocking voice, one he had used since he was a pre-pubescent first exposed to
Monty Python's Flying Circus.
‘The Tattooed Man.'

‘I don't care,' said Jon. ‘I don't care what he says.'

Andy stood and walked to the window. He parted the curtain and peered outside, wearing an expression of incalculable disgust. ‘Why should I listen to you,' he said, ‘and not to him?'

‘Because everything you think he's giving you now is to get back at me for what he thinks I did to him.'

Andy whirled on his heel and faced him. His nostrils flared bullishly.

‘And everything I thought you did for me came from him!' He levelled an accusing finger. ‘Everything you gave to me and Cath wasn't yours to give. It was his.'

‘Bullshit,' Jon spat. He was full of something, a complex cocktail of bitterness, murderous rage, jealousy, mourning and betrayal. ‘That's lies. It's all fucking lies, Andy. He wants to damage me and the best way to do that's by damaging you.'

‘This is
hurting
me, is it?' He motioned to the suit he wore and the new electrical equipment in his living room. ‘You think this is doing me
damage
?'

‘Don't be so fucking stupid,' Jon whispered. Bowing his head wearily, he pinched the fleshless bridge of his nose. ‘Don't be such a fucking idiot.'

‘You arrogant
cunt
,'
Andy spat. ‘You think if you say, “Jump!” I say, “How high?” Bollocks. I'm not scared of you. I know stuff about you none of them will ever know. I know stuff about you I bet you've forgotten.'

‘I know!' Jon raised his head and his voice. ‘That's the point. That's the whole fucking point. That's why I want to help you.'

‘Help me with what?' He drew a great, sorrowful breath. ‘Cathy is dead,' he said, ‘and so is my daughter. What is there to do? What do you think you can do?'

‘It's for Cathy that I'm here.'

Andy turned away. ‘Don't wind me up,' he said.

‘She wouldn't want this,' said Jon. ‘She'd hate to see you hurting yourself like this.'

‘Hurting myself? Christ! You don't know the half of it if you think this is
hurting
myself. This is getting better, Jon. This is getting
over
it.'

Then don't get over it,
he wanted to scream.
Wake up thinking about it and go to sleep thinking about it and dream about it.

‘It's not getting better,' he insisted quietly. ‘It's giving yourself up to someone else.'

‘I'm good at that,' Andy retorted. ‘That's a talent of mine.'

At length, Andy said, ‘Is that it?'

Jon lit a cigarette. ‘There's nothing I can say, is there?'

‘Nothing that'll make me listen.'

‘And nothing that'll make you trust me?'

Andy shook his head once and shrugged, palms up, as if the matter was fully out of his hands.

‘Do you know how stupid you're being? Do you know what kind of life you're getting involved with?'

‘It's
my
life.'

‘No, it's not.'

Andy would not drop his gaze. They stared at each other for too long. Finally, Jon stalked to the kitchen door and kicked it open. Huddled over cups of tea, Gibbon and Olly froze momentarily beneath the frigidity of his glare. He pointed to each of them in turn. His fingers trembled. ‘When the time comes,' he said through blanched lips, ‘it'll be neither of you. Because if it is, you know I'd come for you. You know what I'd do.'

Gibbon met Jon's gaze before looking silently into his mug. Olly, mug cupped between both hands, regarded him over spectacle rims and shrugged non-committally.

‘Christ,' said Jon. ‘You have no say at all, do you? You've no say at all in your own lives.'

Olly offered a placatory smile. ‘Come off it, Jon,' he said. ‘Do
you
?'

The thrill and terror of his freedom raced like current through his veins. He shuddered with it. ‘I do,' he said. ‘I've made myself free.'

For the first time since making his acquaintance, Olly looked at him with genuine fear.

Jon closed the kitchen door softly behind him. He took in several lungfuls of icy, sharp night air, then lit one last cigarette. As he stood in the garden smoking it to the filter, he could sense Gibbon and Olly trying to make out his shape past the reflection they saw of the kitchen, the electric light bouncing back upon them, showing their own shadow-hollowed faces, their empty eye-sockets.

He looked at the sky. There were no stars. The city lay beneath a grimy yellow bubble of electric light pollution.

He waited until the anger was gone: the anger and the frustration and the selfish disappointment. He waited until all that remained was love.

Then he went back inside.

10

White Noise

Chapman awoke confused and terrified. He scrabbled in darkness for the spectacles which lay on a pine bedside cabinet. Closing his hand around the cool twist of metal and glass, he lay back flat against the bed, staring towards the blank darkness of the ceiling. He pulled the duvet up just beneath his eyes.

Sounds in the street outside were filtered by the hissing concussion of blood in his ears. He longed to reach over and turn on the bedside lamp, but the thought of such capitulation to irrational terror served somehow only to increase it.

He had dreamed of Father Christmas and could not understand why it had been so terrible.

He lay immobile for what seemed many minutes before admitting to himself that he was too scared to move. Cursing his stupidity even as he surrendered to it, he leaned over and turned on the light.

Jon was standing at the end of his bed.

Every muscle in Chapman's body spasmed. He let go an animal yodel of primal ferocity and leaped naked from the bed, absurdly pulling the duvet with him and holding it before genitals that had shrivelled tight to his body. He heard himself shouting, ‘Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ, Jesus holy fucking Christ, oh Jesus …' as he retreated to the corner of the room.

Jon regarded him mildly and did not speak.

‘How the fuck—' Chapman began. ‘What do you think—' he bellowed. ‘Jesus
Christ,
Jon,' he yelled. ‘Je
sus
Chr
ist
.'

Jon reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes. He bent his head and lit one, blowing smoke at the ceiling. Still he betrayed nothing resembling an emotion: no curiosity, no wariness, shame, pleasure, anger. A curious blankness Chapman knew he had seen before: the eyes of a child in a man's face, eyes that had passed through time. Chapman needed to piss. He was trembling. He dropped the duvet.

‘I know who you are,' said Jon. ‘And I know who I am.'

At the age of seven, in the dawn of a summer morning, Jon had sneaked on slippered feet into his parents' bedroom and sliced his father's neck with an old cut-throat razor kept in the medicine cabinet.

His father had snuffled and done the things that people do when close to waking. Jon stood still, held his breath, the razor in one hand, the other caressing his velvety foreskin through the cotton of his pyjamas. His father's eyes began eerily to move back and forth behind the bluish membrane of their lids. On tiptoes, feet snug in towelling slippers, Jon leaned over the sleeping figure and, with tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth drew the razor in a single, elegant stroke across his father's throat. His father's eyes opened and his hand jerked in the direction of his neck, from which spouted and pumped an impressive plume of black, arterial blood. Jon had pissed himself.

Chapman wondered now what he would do not to die at the hands of that lost boy become a man, what capitulations he would make, what humiliations he would endure. He thought of Christ in Gethsemane, the Christ of Mark, the Christ in the name of whose suffering he had felt the solidarity of fury and unendurable love.

Jon's eyes moved, met Chapman's. Chapman thought he seemed slight and almost inconsequential.

‘What on earth do you think you're doing, Jon?'

The bedroom seemed alien, to have taken on subtly different dimensions and qualities of light and shade, like a bad dream of hospital. He stood naked, his duvet bunched at his feet, looking at a man who had murdered as a child and whom he had striven since to love and even to protect.

Finally Jon moved. He went to the window and opened the curtain a crack. ‘It'll be daylight soon,' he said.

Chapman became aware of his nakedness. He struggled into an old pair of jeans which lay folded on a chest of drawers. He slipped his sockless feet into his tennis shoes, which lay unlaced beneath the bed. He was shivering and clumsy as he tied them into double bows. Over his head he pulled a navy blue Marks & Spencer sweater which was beginning to fray at one of the cuffs. These were the clothes he liked to wear when he read. Someone had once called them ‘people clothes' and he had been very pleased with the idea.

Jon walked to the wall and flicked on the light switch. The glow was savage in its instant purity. It drained the room of subtlety and gradation. The shadows it cast were solid black and for a moment Chapman had to avert his gaze.

‘What do you want, Jon?' he said.

He remembered Jon slipping unnoticed from the hospital ward like an unglimpsed apparition. The watery feeling in his legs increased. He prayed for strength. He petitioned God for physical might.

Jon massaged his brow. He looked confused for a moment.

Chapman hoped that he was drunk, that he had broken in here on some inebriated whim, to no purpose other than to shock, to announce that he remembered the ward, the visits paid to a murderous child. Even as he hoped he knew it was not so. He wondered how Jon could have gained entry so silently, how he could walked up the rickety stairs without them creaking, opened the stiff bedroom door without the customary protestation of its hinges. Even ghosts betrayed themselves thus. A rash of goose-flesh burst into bloom upon his arms and back, beneath his people clothes.

‘A bad action can have good consequences,' said Jon. ‘Is that correct?'

The priest caught his breath. Here it comes, he thought. Here comes the justification for the things he's about to do to me. He glanced at the telephone which sat next to the bedside lamp.

‘I came to ask that question,' said Jon, ‘and your forgiveness.' He ground out the cigarette on the windowsill and said, ‘When did you recognise me?'

Chapman considered the wisdom of lying. He could see Jon watching him consider. He wondered at the adulterated, childish acuity in that passive and terrifying gaze. ‘I don't know,' he replied, truthfully. ‘Perhaps at the funeral. Certainly in the hospital when I ran into you, although it took me a while to admit it myself. Does it matter?'

Jon shook his head, perhaps to clear it. Chapman wondered if he heard voices in there. If so, what they were urging him to do? Whose imagination was capable of envisaging worse depravities? His or Jon's?

‘Why did you visit me in hospital?'

Which time in hospital?
he wanted to reply. It occurred to him that perhaps to Jon there was no difference, perhaps there was only one time, blurred and incomprehensible. Chapman's visits had stapled the ripped fragments of his past together with his dissipated present.

‘Because it was my duty and my pleasure to do so,' he answered.

Jon licked his lips and looked at the floor.

‘Do you love me?'

The question, delivered with a syntactical precision which betrayed depths of bitterness the priest did not want to understand, hit him like a slap in the face. He considered his reply very carefully and stammered when he spoke. ‘I strive as far as I am able to love all people.'

‘That doesn't answer the question.'

Chapman had one hand pressed flat to the wall as if to draw strength from the building's solidity. He was aware of beads of sweat shining in his moustache. ‘You are a child of God,' he replied. ‘And as such I'm bound to love you.'

‘Despite the sins I might have committed or because of them?'

‘Despite
and
because.'

Jon tilted his head a little to one side. ‘Does that make you a weak man or a strong one?'

This time Chapman did not hesitate. ‘A strong one. Love of one's fellows is the most empowering force there is.'

‘And sacrifice in the name of one's fellows?'

He wiped the sweat away with the back of a hand. ‘Is something beautiful and difficult which is demanded to some degree of all of us.'

‘To sacrifice one's own salvation for love of another?'

‘To sacrifice oneself is often to
be
saved, Jon. This is what the cross taught us. It's the sacrifice that perfects, us. It's in overcoming­, not denying, our fear and our terror and the selfishness of our humanity that brings us closer to God, to the nature of His sacrifice. God Himself cried out in agony on the cross. God Himself was terrified by the thought of His death. But His love was greater than His fear and it is from this that springs His triumph­ and our salvation.'

‘To commit evil, then, in the name of love?'

Chapman needed to sit. He kept that hand pressed solid to the wall, solid to the cool plane of its firm reality. ‘I don't think I understand.'

Jon continued patiently, ‘To do something that you know will damn you not because it satisfies a desire but because it will save another, whom you love. Is that a good act or an evil one?'

Chapman pinched the flesh between his brows. ‘That's entering some complex moral territory, Jon. We need to define our terms, otherwise how do we know we're talking about the same thing? What do you mean by evil? The same as me? Perhaps not. Some people see evil in,' he floundered, as he sought rhetorical comfort in cliché, ‘in the fact that we live lives of relative comfort while God knows how many millions of people across the world live lives of deprivation the like of which we couldn't begin to imagine. There are many, and sometimes I am one of them, who believe that life as it is lived in the West is intrinsically evil. And there are others to whom evil is not a state of existence, but an act of violation, to whom the economic sufferings of the world are an incontrovertible, inevitable fact of life while congress with a prostitute or the abortion of an unwanted child represents an act of unadulterated evil. How can we know that we're talking about the same thing? How can we possibly know?'

Jon appeared to consider this. Then he said, ‘I think we know.'

Chapman did not want to know. He wanted it to be morning. Even a situation such as this would be made more comprehensible by the shedding of natural light, by the passage of cars outside full of people on their way to work. Of milk-floats and lollipop men. ‘I don't think I
do
know Jon,' he lied, because it was not morning but the end of the night, because his guts were flittering and fluttering and he was having trouble controlling his bowels. ‘You're moving much too fast for me. Don't you think we'd be better off discussing this downstairs over a cup of tea and a cigarette?'

Chapman had removed his hand from the comforting support of the wall and made ready to take a confident stride to the door.

Jon took a step sideways and blocked the exit. ‘You know what I mean,' he said.

The priest wiped his brow. ‘You have to
tell
me, Jon. If I'm to help you, you must tell me exactly what it is that's troubling you.'

Jon looked at the ceiling. Chapman thought he heard a tiny, trapped whimper. He wanted to play a child's game. He wanted to stick his fingers in his ears and chant, ‘I can't hear you! I can't hear you!' at the top of his voice until the night was fully over and the children were gone to school and the ‘Today' programme was over on Radio 4 and Jon had been swallowed back into whatever darkness had spawned him.

Jon lowered his head to face the priest and opened his eyes.

‘I killed him.'

Chapman leaned back with both hands against the wall.

‘Killed who?'

‘Andy,' said Jon. ‘I cut his throat and threw his body into the kitchen. I ripped up a pornographic calendar and stuffed some pages of it into his mouth and the hole in his neck.'

Chapman could not stand. He sank to the floor, the wall to his back.

‘Oh, Christ,' he said. He buried his head in his hands, and rubbed at his eyes. ‘Oh God.'

‘Is it a terrible thing I've done?' said Jon. ‘Was it really so bad?'

‘God forgive you,' said the priest, almost silently.

Jon seemed calm and darkly satisfied. ‘I knew you'd think it a terrible thing. But it wasn't. It was a sacrifice in the name of love and that is what you worship and call good.'

He walked forward and stood an inch from Chapman. The priest could smell him, smell the sweat of his exertion. ‘I saved him,' said Jon. He squatted to Chapman's eye level. ‘I did it for him.'

Chapman stuck his finger in his ears and closed his eyes. ‘I can't hear you!' he screamed. ‘I didn't hear you!' He curled into a ball on the carpet and began loudly to hum, loudly enough that he heard no more of what was said to him, nor even that there was more.

He did not fall silent or open his eyes or take his fingers from his ears until it was morning and Jon was gone and the children were gone to school and there was milk on the doorstep and the phone was ringing and he did not want it ever to be dark again.

There was something televisual in hurriedly tugging one's clothes from cupboards and wardrobes and throwing them in a jumble-sale pile first on to the bed then, after a cursory sort through to isolate the favourite and practical, into a zippered holdall.

Only when he had pushed the last inches of bunched shirtsleeve through the last straining gap in the zip and tested the bag for weight did Jon take a moment to think about what he usually carried in it—what horrors it had transported, with what grim contempt he had wielded its contents. Grubby and drawn, he sat heavily on the bed and greedily swigged from a plastic two-litre container of tepid Coca-Cola. He belched and ran the back of a hand across dry lips. Balancing the bottle precariously on his sternum, he lay back and found himself immediately slipping into sleep. Fear of dreaming made him wake and drove him to the bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face and neck.

From a cupboard beneath the stairs he removed a claw hammer and, armed with it, stalked with purpose into the Oblivion Suite. He did not know what to expect—catharsis, perhaps, by means of an obliquely satisfying act of nihilistic, existential triumphalism, but smashing the mirrors proved unsatisfying, labour-intensive and rather more dangerous than he had stopped to consider. He quit very shortly after a small shard of glass sliced through the flesh of his index finger. He dropped the hammer to the floor and left the Oblivion Suite sucking at his bleeding finger.