Mr. In-Between (4 page)

‘Come on,' soothed the Tattooed Man. ‘You've got to know everyone you were in order to love who you are. Sunday supplement psychobabble, but applicable none the less.'

‘There's nothing in me to love,' said Jon.

‘If you are capable of loving, then you are capable of being loved,' said the Tattooed Man, deliberately, Jon realised, avoiding the deepest intended meaning of his statement. ‘Do you love me?'

‘You know I do.'

‘I know I know. And do I love you?'

Jon nodded.

‘Your problem,' said the Tattooed Man, ‘is that you insist on associating love with weakness. But so long as your love is a product of
will
it becomes a thing of power. Don't you think Lucifer loved the angels cast out with him? Weakness is a product of sentimentality: Phil loves you, you've done no end of things for him, but he wouldn't have hesitated to kill you just now. He wouldn't have stopped loving you, either, or for that matter started hating himself. That's strength. That's love.' He sat, lit another cigarette, then, with a passing look of ironic exasperation, picked up the ashtray from the carpet. A small mound of ash had settled into the deep pile. ‘And that's why I'll look after your friend,' he continued. ‘Because you're loyal to me for no other reason than you love me. If you did what I asked only because you were scared of me, I'd despise you.'

Jon smiled. His lips were stiff. ‘Thanks,' he said. ‘It means a lot to me.'

‘That's why I'm doing it.' He took a long draw on the cigarette, tipped a small tube of ash into the ashtray. ‘There is one thing, though,' he said.

‘Anything,' said Jon.

Carnivorously the Tattooed Man gazed from beneath his brow. ‘If I asked you to kill him, would you do it?'

Jon did not pause. ‘In a second.'

The Tattooed Man nodded, and slapped Jon's back. ‘I know,' he said, and went to change the record. The shadows cast by the cockerel played across his back and the expanse of wall, like the flickerings of blank celluloid, ancient and scratched and projected on a screen. A map of nerves.

The following Monday Andy started work in a garage owned by the Tattooed Man. Jon turned up at lunchtime. Andy's legs were visible, clad in already filthy overalls and steel-capped workboots, protruding from beneath the bonnet of a battered Volvo estate. Jon ignored him for the moment and motioned silently for the other two employees, Gibbon and Rickets, to join him in the ‘office', a tiny room strewn with papers and half-empty mugs of tea. They did as they were told, after exchanging an eloquent glance. Gibbon, a graceless ginger monster, put the kettle on to boil after wiping his hands on a filthy rag, then sat in the greasy revolving chair while Rickets perched on the end of the table, pushing aside a tottering, dog-eared sheaf of loose papers.

‘What can we do you for?' said Rickets, scratching an armpit, his casualness a transparent over-compensation. The only thing beautiful about him was his extraordinarily lustrous skin, black beyond black, within which Jon could see swirls of colour, like light refracting from a puddle of oil. His teeth were yellow and cracked like antique ivory.

‘I've come to have a word.'

‘About what?' said Rickets. Rickets was a bad man. He was the worst kind of man. He was a man who had voided himself of conscience, leaving only a sense of warped humour unburdened by anything but the most cursory irony. He had done bad things and dreamed of doing worse. He would erupt into petulant temper and injure another human being, any human being regardless of sex, age or race, for no reason other than proximity, than sheer joyless malice. He was scared of Jon. He did not properly know how to be scared.

‘I take it that you're aware that Andy's a friend of mine?'

Gibbon paused in the act of pouring boiling water into a cracked mug. He and Rickets exchanged a momentary glance. Something passed between them.

‘No,' said Rickets. ‘I didn't know that.'

‘I thought you might like to.'

‘Yeah. Right. Thanks.'

‘Then I can assume that it goes without saying that he'll be treated with a great deal of respect.' He glanced out of the office window, which was so grimed with exhaust-fume grit it framed the garage in haze like a Victorian photograph.

Gibbon spread his hands. ‘Of course. No need to ask.'

Jon nodded, looked at Rickets, who scratched his woolly head then nodded in return.

‘Nice one,' said Jon. He left the office struggling with a small smile.

Through the grimy window, Rickets watched his retreating back. ‘Wanker,' he said, raising a rigid middle finger at waist height.

Jon squatted and tapped Andy's shin. ‘Hello, tosser,' he said. ‘Fancy a pint?'

Andy wriggled from beneath the car. He sat up, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. ‘Is it lunch already?'

Through the window Andy caught Gibbon's eye and performed a short mime that somehow communicated exactly this: ‘I know I'm not finished yet but would it be OK if I went for lunch?'

Gibbon raised an affirmative thumb and smiled before half-turning and exchanging rapid words with Rickets. Andy returned the gesture, which Gibbon acknowledged with exaggerated
bonhomie
before turning once more.

He and Rickets continued to convene quickly and quietly. They did not look at Jon.

The pub was busy with lunchtime custom. Jon perched on a stool with a worn velveteen cover, elbows resting on the dark varnish of the round table while without comment Andy bought them drinks and a sandwich each.

Andy chinked his glass against Jon's. ‘Cheers,' he said. ‘I can't tell you how much I appreciate you sorting me out like this.'

‘As long as you're sorted.'

‘Well, put it this way: I'm more sorted than I was.' He tore a chunk from the sandwich. A tiny sliver of ham rode on his chomping lips like a cowboy in some hellish rodeo. ‘At least there's light at the end of the tunnel.'

Jon bit from his own sandwich and tried to chew without expressing the dry disgust he felt. ‘Do you owe money?'

Andy shifted. ‘A bit here and there. You know.'

‘How much is a bit here and a bit there when it's at home?'

Andy told him.

‘I didn't know it was that bad,' said Jon. He took a sip of tepid bitter, then reached into his jacket pocket.

Andy raised his hands before him. ‘Hang on,' he said. ‘No way. I can't accept anything else from you.'

‘Don't be a moron,' said Jon. ‘I've got more money than I know what to do with. Let me help.'

Andy averted his eyes and ground his teeth. ‘I couldn't,' he said. ‘I couldn't just take your money. It's a lot of money, for fuck's sake. It's a lot of money. I couldn't.'

Jon sighed. He was unaccountably irritated. ‘Look,' he said, ‘once you've got yourself together you can start to pay me back. If you want I'll take
interest,
for Christ's sake. The money might as well be doing something useful in the meantime. I'm never going to spend it.'

He watched as Andy silently debated with himself. The agonies of pride that cannot be afforded. The relief of being shown a way out, of surrendering a responsibility that cannot be met.

There was something foreign inside Jon. It was not pity because there was within it a complex thread of pleasure, a satisfaction to which he did not want to admit because he feared to understand it. He did not know how best to compose his face. In a moment it had passed. He had no wish for it ever to return.

Andy met his eyes. Tentatively: ‘Are you sure?'

‘I wouldn't say it if I wasn't.'

‘I'd pay you back.'

‘If you like.'

‘It would make a difference.' Andy conceded quietly. ‘It would make all the difference.'

Jon opened the chequebook, scribbled in it with a black Biro. ‘Buy Cathy something,' he said. ‘Some clothes or something. I don't know. A dishwasher or something.'

Andy took the cheque, smudged its edges with oil. ‘I don't know what to say,' he said. Jon reached across the table, placed a hand on his shoulder and said nothing. Somebody walked into the pub and for a second they were frozen in this meagre intimacy.

Later, Phil was noticeably nervous as he and Jon dressed head to toe in black bikers' leathers. Before he squeezed his head into the helmet, he said, ‘What's he up to with this one? It doesn't make any sense.'

Jon pulled on a gauntlet. ‘I don't know,' he admitted, checking that the glove was snug. He squeaked when he moved, a bathetic note of low comedy to offset his sinister appearance. ‘He's beginning to move in mysterious ways.'

Phil concurred with a muffled grunt. ‘Fucking right he is. This is just beyond me. Way above my head.'

Jon pulled on his own helmet. ‘Let's get it over with.'

They walked from the derelict house, pushing aside the creaking iron gate. Phil mounted a black Suzuki motorcycle, kicked it into life, and Jon settled behind him. They leaned into the curve as the bike turned right, then straightened and weaved like an irritable meat-fly through the congested traffic of a main arterial road. Half a mile further, they pulled up across the road from a high-street building society.

‘They're late,' said Phil with a note of panic.

Jon clapped his shoulder reassuringly. ‘It'll be OK.'

‘We're a bit obvious here, aren't we?'

‘One minute,' said Jon. ‘We'll give them one minute, then we'll leave.'

Phil gunned the engine. Jon was uncomfortably aware that its roar had attracted the attention of several of the bored customers who formed the building society queue, and perceived the minute flickers of trepidation which passed among them. One or two of the staff, alerted by the slight shift in the hormonal balance of the air, glanced up with more recognisable anxiety. Jon dismounted and, kneeling, made a mime of fiddling with the bike's exposed chromium engine. Phil was tapping his feet.

A red Ford Escort pulled up outside the building society. Jon tapped Phil's leg. From the car spilled four men in ski masks, hurried and spiky with adrenaline. Carrying sawn-off shotguns, they bustled clumsily through the smoked-glass doors of the office. From the street the pandemonium inside was pantomimic and surreal: pensioners freezing, hands on heads, women scooping children from the floor, young men emasculated and terrified, muzzles waved and brandished and gloved fingers pointing this way and that.

Jon took a moment to get his breath, then stood, opened the bike's saddle-bag and withdrew a conscientiously oiled semi- automatic pistol. He tucked it under one armpit as he dodged traffic, then held it aloft as he walked through the smoked-glass doors. For an extended fragment of time, all activity froze. He held the pistol high and steady and let it bark twice. The first of the ski-masked men folded violently at the waist as the impact drove him into the wall. A fine spray of blood rained slowly upon the customers who by now were stretched across the floor. Hands over heads, arms folded protectively about children too scared to sob. The second burst of fire, as decisive an exclamation as the first, sent the second man spinning on his axis like a spastic ballerina, sawn-off spinning gracefully from his hand. The third was in the process of turning, raising his gun, when a third burst, more accurate, shattered much of his head. The fourth had been given perhaps two seconds in which to react: he spun on his heel, gun in one outstretched hand, and discharged both barrels. Although the shots hit the wall behind him, something hot and sharp, like a tiny meteor shower, rained on Jon's back, pittering and pattering against the motorcycle helmet. He drew an unhurried aim on the fourth man, who was running for the door. Glass shattered in his wake like crashing surf and cascaded in jewelled shards about his head as the jumping muzzle pursued him. When the line of fire crossed his shoulders, he was rammed head-first through plate-glass and on to the pavement, coming to a twitching halt across the bonnet of the red Escort. The horrified, pasty-faced young man at the wheel, who only that morning had woken thrilled with his new role as Driver, reversed with a smoking banshee wail into the traffic, letting the corpse slide from the bonnet into the gutter.

It had taken considerably less than ten seconds. Jon turned and sprinted on to the street, the beginnings of a crowd scattering like water the moment he did so. He clambered on to the back of the revving motorcycle, and Phil accelerated away. At the appointed place they dumped the bike, clambered over a fence and into a trading estate where a van was waiting. The back doors opened as they approached, and closed behind them as they threw themselves in, to the smell of white spirit and stripped pine and the hammering of exhilarated hearts.

‘I couldn't believe it,' said Phil. ‘There were four of them. I admit that I was ready to call it a day there and then, I mean there were four of them and we were only expecting two, but Jon here walks in, cool as a bloody cucumber, and takes them all out before you can say Jack Robinson. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. It was beautiful. It was like a film.'

The Tattooed Man grinned wolfishly, and poured Phil a whisky. Jon had spent much of the afternoon having shrapnel removed from the back of his arm. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, both of which had been taken from the Tattooed Man's wardrobe. Jon's own clothes had blood on them and had since been incinerated in the basement.

‘You played your part, too, Phil,' said the Tattooed Man. ‘That was a beautifully arranged get-away. Pretty impressive all round.'

‘Cheers,' said Phil. He was still shaking.

Jon sipped whisky.

‘You shouldn't be drinking,' said the Tattooed Man. ‘Not on top of all that medication.'

‘Come off it,' protested Jon. ‘I'm toasting myself.'

‘And so you should,' said the Tattooed Man. He stood, glass in hand. ‘To Jon,' he proposed.