Mr. In-Between (3 page)

‘Well, it was good to see you,' Jon said, for lack of anything better. ‘Take care, mate. Look after yourself.'

With the jacket half on his shoulders, Andy paused. ‘Look,' he said, ‘I'll give you my address. Why don't you come round for tea tomorrow?'

Jon shifted in his seat. This is what people did. What mates who had grown up together did. He doubted his capacity to function in such a context. The world in which he moved had become so familiar he had almost forgotten that it was not his, that he despised Fat Dave and Jagger and Jimmy the Scot. ‘Tea?'

Andy leaned on the table. ‘Yeah, you know. Meet Cathy and Kirsty and that.'

Weren't children supposed to have a sense of things that bordered on the psychic? Would the child be
scared
of him? He determined to decline, to bite down on his embarrassment until Andy had walked through the pub door and back into that other world. He even opened his mouth to answer, then again he remembered those eyes enraged by his pain and humiliation. ‘Of course,' he said.

‘Nice one.' Andy stooped and ripped open the empty cigarette packet. He patted his pockets, made a face and wove to the bar, returning with a red Biro. He scribbled for a second, then handed the dissected fag packet to Jon and said, ‘Give me a call tomorrow.'

‘About lunchtime,' said Jon.

Andy paused at the door, fumbling with the buttons of his denim jacket. ‘Nice one,' he said again, and stepped outside.

Jon drank alone until ten thirty, then walked into the damp but tepid summer evening, drawing his jacket about him and huddling within as if for protection. He walked to Fat Dave's flat. The door was answered by Jagger, who had his hand on his zip.

‘All right, Jon?' he said. ‘You've just caught me on the way to the bog, mate. Go through and they'll deal you in.'

Dave's flat was ripe with the grey odours of unwashed humanity and malnourished dogs. A desiccated turd lay in the hallway against the skirting board, from which peeled wallpaper that had once been garish but was now a step away from dust. In the front room, Fat Dave and friends were huddled about a table with affected looks of intense concentration. Dave glanced up and offered a can of Special Brew. ‘What happened to you this afternoon?'

Jon shrugged. ‘You know.'

Much nudging and winking.

He sat at the table, sipping thick, catarrhal beer, and picked up the cards Dave dealt him. They were unpleasant to the touch. They began to play, and steadily he began to lose a great deal of money.

He was full of unspecific and inappropriate shame as he stepped from the taxi the following afternoon. Andy's house was an identikit council property surrounded by shabby clones which lined a shabby street in the middle of a shabby estate. It was definitively the kind of place where one might
end up.
It was not a place of transition. It was a place where one made the most of things. It was the kind of place where neighbours burgled neighbours, or accused neighbours of burgling neighbours, where a car was, at best, a temporary purchase, where playgrounds were littered with the detritus of hopelessness, used condoms like eviscerated slugs, the odd glue bag fluttering in the breeze as if at the racial memory of flight, where children with Victorian faces smoked stolen cigarettes while ogling stolen pornography.

He walked up the garden path and rapped on the door. He was excruciatingly aware of something in the house going tense. Andy answered the door. They smiled at one another.

‘Come in. Take off your coat.'

The living room was small, almost filled by a brown corduroy three-piece suite and a television. There were pictures on the wall that Jon knew, with an ache in his testicles, had been hung there to
brighten up the place.

‘Sit down.'

‘Cheers.'

While he was half-way to sitting, Cathy walked into the room. Her hair was washed and pulled into a ponytail and she was wearing a sweater and jeans. She smiled and said ‘Hello' and Jon said ‘Hello' back and she said, ‘Make yourself at home,' and he sat. Then she bent, heel to haunch, and poked her face around the corner of the door, into the hallway. ‘Are you going to come in, now?' she asked. Then she turned to Jon and said, ‘She's ever so shy.'

A small child toddled into the room, on the edge of balance, stubby arms stretched horizontally, massive head lolling, her sticky face radiant with the joy of her achievement. In one fist she clasped a lollipop, which had smeared sugar around her mouth. There were even sticky bits of it in her hair. Jon was discomfited by the confidence with which Cathy scooped her up and into her arms. ‘Say “hello”.'

The child gurgled. ‘Lo,' she said, and buried her face in her mother's breast.

Absurdly Jon found himself wanting the child to like him. He wished he knew how to make it happen. He imagined some simple conjuring trick might be appropriate, such as producing a fifty-pence piece from behind her ear. Instead he smiled a rictal smile and gave a single, staccato wave. ‘Hello,' he said.

‘Lo,' said the child.

‘Hello,' repeated Jon. He felt frozen in a moment he could not escape. He sensed that something was required. ‘She's lovely,' he said. He could scarcely believe that he had voiced the word ‘lovely' without caustic intent. His voice sounded comical and clumsy, as if the words were the wrong shape for his lips.

Cathy laughed. ‘She's a little terror.' She nuzzled her daughter's face. ‘Aren't you? Aren't you a little bloody terror?' She set the child on the floor and Kirsty staggered precariously behind her father's legs. Andy made a neat manoeuvre and scooted behind her, took her beneath her chubby arms and swung her in an arc above his head. Jon caught Cathy's eye as the child yelled her delight: the danger of falling, the safety of her father's arms. The exquisite uncertainties of childhood.

‘I know,' Cathy said. ‘He's an idiot.'

The child showed Jon her dolls, all of which were unclothed, and only some of which had heads. Andy sat across from him and they talked. Cathy produced a pot of tea on a tray and sat, largely in silence until Andy related the circumstances of their meeting, when she contradicted him and once slapped him on the arm in mock outrage.

‘He thinks I fancied him when we were at school,' she told Jon, ‘but I thought he was a poser and a big-head.'

Jon confirmed that Andy had been just that.

‘He used to have these shoes,' she said. ‘These
blue
shoes with buckles on them.'

‘They were good shoes,' protested Andy.

‘They were bloody
horrible
,'
Cathy corrected him. ‘They were like something out of
Star Wars.
'

‘Hang on a minute,' Andy answered. ‘If you didn't fancy me, how did you come to notice my shoes, for God's sake? Do you always pay such attention to people's footwear?' He looked at Jon for confirmation of this minor victory.

‘I wasn't
looking,
especially,' Cathy pointed out. ‘You just couldn't miss them. They were that horrible. People laughed at you on the street.'

Jon agreed that this was not an unreasonable point.

Andy protested with further circumstantial evidence: ‘She wrote my name on her biology book,' he told Jon.

‘I did
not.
'
This was when she slapped his arm.

‘He probably hasn't told you this,' Jon told her, ‘but one night I spent a whole evening watching him get drunk so he could find the courage to phone you. In the end he passed out.'

She seemed unsurprised, indeed vaguely affronted. ‘He used to follow me around school as well,' she shuddered. ‘It was a bit creepy.'

‘Christ,' said Andy. ‘Who's full of herself tonight?' He looked very pleased.

Presently she left to bathe the child, and put her to bed before preparing the dinner. She declined Jon's offer of some help, which he had assumed would be expected and welcome. She was, according to Andy, ‘funny about the kitchen'.

They drank Jon's wine with the traditional Sunday meal. When Jon expressed his appreciation there was a slight awkwardness and he regretted opening his mouth. He couldn't seem to find the right thing to say. He felt himself to be an accessory to their conversation rather than a part of it, someone whose function was to listen to the jokes and appreciate occult references to years past without ever actually being central to the discussion.

Cathy wouldn't let him wash up. She brought them a beer and a glass each, and disappeared into the mysterious kitchen, about which she was funny, but in which way she gave no clue.

They lapsed into silence. Andy's joblessness fell heavily between them, like an unspoken bereavement. Eventually Jon spoke. ‘Listen,' he said. ‘I've got a few friends here and there. I might be able to sort you something out. It won't be much.'

Andy set his beer on the floor. ‘What sort of stuff?'

‘I don't know, this and that.' He seemed to think. ‘You're good with cars, aren't you?'

‘Well, I don't know about
good …
'

‘You can make cars that don't go, go, can't you?'

‘Well, yeah. I suppose so. Yeah, I can. I'm all right at that. If it can be done, like.'

‘I'll see what I can do. I'll have a word with somebody. It might just be a bit of temporary cash-in-hand. Off the books, you know.'

‘That's fine,' he said. ‘Anything.'

‘It could lead on, though,' said Jon. ‘Depending on how things work out.'

‘Course,' said Andy. ‘Course.'

He looked at Jon with embarrassingly naked gratitude and something like wonder before calling for his wife. She walked into the room drying her hands on a dishcloth. Andy explained to her almost word for word what Jon had told him.

She looked at Jon with newly serious appraisal, an indication that she was aware that relationships had changed, that he was moving from Andy's past into their present. He sensed for one illogical second that she had some intimation of the future this would involve, and that it frightened her.

Later that week he sat at the Tattooed Man's kitchen table, a mug of coffee in one hand, a newspaper spread open before him, upon which the Tattooed Man dropped an A4 jiffy bag. Jon removed the documents it contained, examined them. Names, addresses, photographs.

The Tattooed Man waited for him to digest the contents, then said, ‘I went out of my way to promote good will with these wankers. They're part of a
Welsh separatist
movement, would you believe.' Jon nearly choked on his coffee, spat some across the paper. The Tattooed Man indicated with a wave of his hand that he thought he had seen everything. He tapped the side of his aquiline, much-broken nose and smiled with singular malevolence. ‘I don't think any particular subtlety is called for in this instance,' he said. ‘I think it would be best all round if you just kicked the living shit out of them. You might as well leave them alive to tell the tale. But not necessarily psychologically intact.'

Two days later in a tower block in Cardiff Jon spent fifteen tiring minutes beating three men senseless with a series of blunt objects. First there was a baseball bat, with which he struck at knees and ribs and necks, then, when this was finally torn from his grip, a short rubber cosh kept in his back pocket. Finally there was a sock filled with snooker balls, which he was forced to intercept and wrest from the hand of one of the men, shattering bones in the process. The man lost his balance, fell into the sofa. Jon swung the makeshift cosh in a wide arc that terminated in the side of the man's head. The man collapsed with astonishing certitude, like a cow stunned in a slaughter house. The dreadful, dull concussion brought a momentary stillness to the room. Jon was out of breath and in a degree of pain. He took a moment to regain his breath, half-crouched in the mess of upturned and broken furniture, between the remaining two men and the door. Each of them was exhausted and clearly terrified. There were flecks of blood on the walls.

When Jon had done, he taped the oldest of them, half-conscious and dishevelled, to a kitchen chair, then sat and smoked a cigarette. The first man was still and silent. It was possible that Jon had swung the snooker-ball cosh with too much prejudice. The other man lay quietly on his back gazing blankly at the ceiling, one arm crossed loosely on his chest. He would require a short convalescence, and perhaps counselling. He had begged for his life and Jon had let him. He had shit his trousers and Jon had laughed.

When the cigarette was smoked, Jon kneeled before the man taped to the chair and said, ‘This was a goodwill gesture. If I have to come back I'll cut out your tongue so you won't be able to scream, and so I'm able to really take my time and enjoy myself. Do you understand?' He took a knife from his back pocket and unfolded it before the man's eyes, so close they crossed trying to focus on it. The man whimpered and struggled. He was trying to say ‘please'. Very quietly, Jon said, ‘I'll cut your fucking face off. Do you understand?'

The man was unable to nod. He lacked the strength. His head lolled on his chest and he shuddered and wept for his humiliation. Jon lifted his face and spat in it.

As Phil chauffeured him home he became aware of a pain deep in the muscles in his back, as if something had ripped there. It was an unfamiliar pain and a nagging one, present even in his dreams that night, absurdly and comically symbolised by a pair of lurid blue shoes with buckles on the side.

3

The Good Thing

Grey rain lashed the bay window. The topiary cockerel in the garden had its spindly bones whipped this way and that. A pleasant whistling emanated from the chimney, like that made by a child blowing across the rim of a bottle.

Phil the driver placed a tray on the coffee table and poured the Tattooed Man and Jon a cup of tea. The Tattooed Man, legs crossed, a
Daily Telegraph
folded on his lap, thanked him. Phil replied with a tight acknowledging smile and closed the door behind him.

‘Put a record on,' said the Tattooed Man, reaching out for a cup and saucer, on the edge of which balanced two chocolate Hobnobs.

Jon walked to the wall and ran his finger along ranked compact discs. ‘What do you want?'

‘I don't know. Something a bit cheery.'

‘Show tunes?'

The Tattooed Man placed the saucer on the floor and joined him. They stood side to side, in each other's force field, and gazed blankly at the numberless thin spines.

‘I'm up to here with show tunes. And this sounds like cocaine psychosis. The trouble is,' he said, ‘that I'm bored with all of it.' Finally, with an index finger he levered a CD from the shelf and handed it to Jon. ‘I haven't heard this for a while.'

It was
Hunky Dory
by David Bowie. The Tattooed Man not only had David Bowie's autograph but a photograph of David Bowie signing it. Bowie's haircut and impossible degree of emaciated ethereality dated it sometime in the early 1970s. Jon was not sure if this was some kind of long-running, arcane private joke.

‘Right, then,' said the Tattooed Man, and took a satisfying half-moon crunch from the biscuit, catching the crumbs in an open palm. ‘This friend of yours. Do I know him?'

‘No.'

‘Why not? Have you been keeping secrets?'

‘Of course not. I just haven't seen him for years. We were at school together.'

The Tattooed Man drained what must have been scalding hot tea then leaned to pour another. ‘A good friend, was he?'

‘He looked after me.'

‘That's one of the things I like most about you,' said the Tattooed Man. ‘Your sense of obligation.'

Jon protested weakly. ‘It's hardly obligation.'

‘Loyalty, then. If you prefer.'

Jon shrugged. ‘I don't know. I just know him.'

The Tattooed Man smiled. ‘Good enough. I'll see what I can do.'

Jon scratched his cheek. I don't think he's up to anything too strenuous. Morally.'

‘I don't have any vacancies for moral philosophers.'

‘You know what I mean.'

‘Of course. I always know what you mean.'

‘He's got a kid.'

‘Phil's got kids. Hundreds of them, if I remember correctly.'

‘He's not like Phil.'

‘Nobody's like Phil,' said the Tattooed Man. They laughed.

‘Andy's not weak,' said Jon. ‘It's just … his kid. I know his wife.' He shifted in his chair. He became aware that he was sweating and that his cheeks were hot. He hoped the Tattooed Man hadn't noticed and knew that he had.

Again, the Tattooed Man laughed, then wiped the corners of his eyes and said, ‘I'm sorry. I shouldn't. It's just nice to see you getting out and making friends of your own. It'll do you good. It does me good to see it.'

Jon was unsure whether he was being ridiculed. He didn't altogether understand the Tattooed Man's sense of humour. Sometimes he doubted whether it actually constituted a sense of humour at all in anything but the most cosmetic sense. When the Tattooed Man laughed, which was often, it was seldom a laugh that seemed to stem from immediate stimuli: he laughed at a notion, a connotation that reflected at a cracked tangent from the words he used to articulate it. Sometimes Jon looked at the Tattooed Man's teeth and gums as the lips pulled back and was fascinated by the feral savagery and joy he saw there. He was reminded of the fairground automata that had terrified him as a child: laughing crones and clowns that had come, to him, to encapsulate the very essence of intelligent malevolence.

‘Don't take the piss,' he said.

The Tattooed Man knuckled his eyes again. ‘I'm not,' he said. ‘Well, not in a nasty way. You've got to admit it's odd. Mr Zen gets sentiment.'

‘I haven't changed.'

‘I'm not saying that you
have.
You should be happy that you still have it in you to surprise me after all these years.'

Jon chose his words carefully. ‘I couldn't think of anything that would surprise you,' he said. ‘I wouldn't want to try.'

‘Everything surprises me,' said the Tattooed Man, ‘if I look for surprise. Sometimes I'm surprised to find out how old I am.'

‘How old are you?'

‘Ancient.'

‘Too old for David Bowie.'

Dark shadows in the fleshy folds at the bridge of his broken nose, the furrowed brow of a retired pugilist rolling a cigarette with thick fingers. ‘Never too old to rock and roll,' he said.

Jon laughed and shook his head. ‘I never know,' he said, ‘if you're trying to be eccentric.'

The Tattooed Man brushed crumbs from his lapel. ‘That would be pretentious of me, and I've no need to pretend to you that I'm something that I'm not. You know everything that I am.'

‘I don't know if I do,' said Jon. ‘I don't know if I see things the way you do.'

The Tattooed Man produced a pack of cigarettes, unwrapping the Cellophane seal with a spatulate, yellowed nail horny enough to blunt scissors. ‘Which I still don't understand,' he said. ‘Did you read none of the books I gave you?'

‘Of course. I read all of them.'

‘And you found none of them illuminating?'

‘I thought they were all very good.'

‘However?'

Jon took a cigarette from the proffered packet, tapped its filter on the coffee table to settle the tobacco. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘None of it seemed relevant to me. I don't identify with universal concerns.'

‘None of it moved you at
all
?'

Jon shook his head. ‘I might be articulate,' he said, ‘but I'm a vulgarian and a thug at heart.'

‘You try to be,' conceded the Tattooed Man, ‘keeping company with scum and wankers.' He said this with a twist of disgust. ‘I wish you wouldn't. I really do. They give me a pain on your behalf.'

Jon lit, inhaled, exhaled. Paused. Inhaled. Exhaled. ‘They keep things real,' he said, and knew that the flush had drained from his face. He could feel his bloodlessness.

‘Scatology is no escape from metaphysics,' said the Tattooed Man darkly, in the portentous manner he adopted when he was least self-conscious, when what Jon suspected was his fundamental, contemptuous self flickered in his scowl. ‘That's intellectual and existential cowardice at its very worst. Immersing yourself in vomit and shit is a cowardly tactic to avoid confrontation with what's truly important.'

‘Like what?'

Darkness seemed to pool at the Tattooed Man's feet and he swelled with it, drawing substance and nourishment. ‘God,' he said. ‘Death. Love. The Devil.'

‘Those things don't mean anything to me.'

The Tattooed Man shrank into his anger like water folding about itself before coming to the boil. ‘Those things mean something to everyone, whether they know it or not. Only an idiot thinks otherwise.'

Jon feared to answer. The Tattooed Man closed his fists on his fury. Jon's heart beat heavy beneath his ribs. ‘They don't mean anything to me,' he repeated.

The Tattooed Man stood and bellowed the agony of release. One of his knees upended the coffee table and in the perceptual slow motion clarity of shock, Jon watched the teapot spin as it fell, a corona of golden liquid arcing behind then briefly encircling it in a spiral before it hit the carpet and gushed forth its contents.

Head lowered bullishly, the Tattooed Man advanced upon him, meaty hands drawn into scarred fists. ‘What do you mean,' he whispered, fury laced with almost petulant sarcasm, ‘“
they don't mean anything to me
”?'

Jon's testicles shrivelled into his body and he felt tiny and fragile. The Tattooed Man towered above him. ‘Don't you know what you are?'

Jon forced himself to meet his gaze. He knotted his fingers and spoke quietly. ‘I know what I am,' he said.

Something flickered in the eyes of the monster the Tattooed Man seemed to have become. Jon thought that perhaps it was pity. Whatever it had been, the Tattooed Man was already drawing the anger back into himself, shrinking and folding within it as Phil the driver kicked open the door. He carried a handgun that had an absurd, spindly proboscis of a silencer which, legs spread, he levelled at Jon.

Jon looked into his face. Phil's eyes were as lifelessly alert as lollipops. Phil was not visible in them.

‘It's all right, Phil,' said the Tattooed Man with an oddly dissipated wave.

Phil glanced uncertainly at the Tattooed Man, then back at Jon.

‘I got carried away,' said the Tattooed Man, addressing Phil in the contrived colloquialism he used in the presence of those whom he deemed otherwise incapable of comprehending him. He privately addressed Jon and a cabal of others in a way that was formal in presentation but intimate by implication. There were still others, of whom Jon had only peripheral knowledge, before whom the Tattooed Man pretended nothing. Jon understood that not all of them were friends or allies.

The Tattooed Man had adopted the uneasy, nervously over-casual tone of a teenage babysitter disturbed
in flagrante.
‘It's my fault,' he said. ‘You know how frustrated I get with Jon sometimes. It's not his fault. It's mine. I shouldn't interfere. I'm a nosy old woman.'

Phil's hand began to tremble and he lowered the pistol. ‘Oh, fuck,' he said, with something like shame, as he replaced the gun in the holster he wore beneath his arm. ‘Oh, fuck. I'm sorry, Jon.'

Jon waved away the apology with a cold hand. ‘No problem,' he said.

The Tattooed Man put his arm paternally about Phil's shoulders. ‘Jon understands,' he said softly. ‘You did well. That was quick off the mark.'

Phil wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. ‘I spilled my tea,' he said.

The Tattooed Man chortled. ‘Never mind. So did I. I'll mop it up later.'

‘That's all right,' said Phil. ‘I'll do it.'

‘Rubbish. Go and put your feet up.'

‘Right you are,' said Phil. He looked sheepishly at Jon. ‘I'm really sorry, Jon,' he repeated.

‘There's nothing to be sorry for,' said Jon.

‘No hard feelings, then.'

‘Don't be stupid. It's forgotten already.'

‘Right you are. Cheers.' He closed the door respectfully and silently, like someone leaving a confessional or entering a public lavatory. Once more, like a cloud of ancient dust whipped into a loose vortex by a breeze, the peculiar intimacy settled about their shoulders and altered the quality of the light.

‘I'm sorry,' said the Tattooed Man, head hung low.

Jon looked at his hands. They were trembling. ‘You scared the shit out of me,' he said.

The Tattooed Man looked about him as if surprised that he still stood, then sat and for a moment was silent. ‘I only get angry because I want the best for you. I don't like you hating yourself. It hurts me.'

‘I don't hate myself,' said Jon.

‘It's not enough to know yourself,' insisted the Tattooed Man. ‘You have to
revel
in what you are. I hate to see you associating with scum because you're scared to admit what you know. They don't keep you real, they keep you in the mire. It's I who keep you real.'

Jon did not intend, and had not expected, such a level of audacity and bitterness in his reply. ‘I'm not like you,' he said. ‘There's something inside you. You're driven by will. But I don't have anything inside me. I don't make choices like you do. I'm incapable. So what would you have me do? Attend the ballet with hit men and Shakespeare with assassins? It doesn't make any difference. All places are as one. I only pretend in order not to disappear entirely.'

The Tattooed Man listened, chin resting on fist, staring at the wall. Finally, he answered, ‘You're just not admitting to yourself what you are.'

Exasperated Jon said, ‘Then what am I?'

The Tattooed Man knotted his fists in his lap. ‘An uncommonly loyal friend. A man with sufficient will and love to do things he considers questionable because the consequent self-hatred is secondary to his love and sense of duty.'

Jon laughed, then, absurdly, tears welled in his eyes and he blinked several times in rapid succession. He felt the Tattooed Man's walnut-knuckled hand spread across his back. ‘Come on, Jon,' he said. ‘Come on. You know all this. It's not as if you haven't heard it before.'

Jon sniffed, wiped his nose. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I don't know what's wrong with me.'

The Tattooed Man became both more casual and distant, closing the perceptual door upon his self. ‘There's nothing wrong with you. Why you of all people are hung up on all that macho shit is beyond me. There's nothing wrong with crying. It's about time I saw you have a good sniffle. It'll do you good. You can't keep everything bottled up all the time. It'll kill you.' He stroked Jon's hair, forehead to nape, in long, gentle waves, Jon wanted to nuzzle into the palm of his hand like a cat. ‘I know there's a lot you haven't told me. I wish you'd talk to me.'

‘It was seeing Andy,' confessed Jon, simultaneously demonstrating trust and servitude by offering his weakness. ‘I remembered what I was like as a kid.'

Jon's memory of early childhood had always been the colour of weak tea gone cold. When he considered the institutionalised child he was assured he had been, he might have been remembering a lost brother. He sometimes thought he vaguely remembered meeting his foster parents for the first time, although this half-memory too was without colour and even sentiment, for he could not have known then who they were to become. His first true memory of himself was also a memory of Andy. Twelve years old and in school uniform, one of them far bigger than the other, both with bad haircuts and scuffed shoes, schoolbags slung over shoulders,
faux-
nonchalantly sharing a cigarette as they sauntered home. The image had the ghostly colour of a Polaroid left too long on a window sill and was accompanied only by the muted sounds of traffic. Jon could not remember what he had sounded like, what the pitch of his voice had been. What he had talked about.