Mr. In-Between

by Neil Cross

  An insipid light glimmered through a chink in the downstairs curtains, then the Tattooed Man came to the door, bathed in the sudden radiance of a security light. His grin was triumphant and affectionate. When he smiled his eyes crinkled pleasantly, the furrows running deep in leathery flesh. He might have been sixty, with cropped grey hair thinning at the temples. For all his urbanity he had about him something of the thug, an imposing physical presence. The bridge of his nose was fleshy and much broken and his hands were gnarled and callused. His teeth were almost childishly small, chipped and stained like little ivory pegs. His voice was deep, with an aftertaste of irony and accent. Sometimes when he smiled and flashed those childish teeth he resembled a Victorian street urchin, some malevolent imp grown subtle and deathlessly old.

  He took Jon’s hands in his and shook his head from side to side in silent admiration. Jon smiled in return and followed the Tattooed Man into the house. He led him through to the kitchen, at the outside door of which whined an Alsatian, half-rampant, ears pressed flat to its head.

  The Tattooed Man walked to the door and, nudging the dog gently to one side with his knee, turned the key in the lock and yanked it. The dog poured through the gap like sinuous liquid and, nose to grass, followed a meandering path to the pool of deep shadow beneath the apple tree where, haunches trembling, it defecated. Through the window, Jon could see light reflecting from the back of the animal’s eyes, giving them an unearthly radiance.

  ‘Look at him,’ said the Tattooed Man from the door. ‘He’s embarrassed. Silly sod.’

  Jon opened the fridge, pushed aside a large jar of mayonnaise and removed a cold beer. The dog, as if to suggest that its interest in the garden had been instigated by any number of factors besides the need for defecation, was sauntering about in casual circles, ears half-cocked.

  ‘Come in then,’ the Tattooed Man called to the dog. ‘Come in, boy.’

  The hound looked coquettishly over its shoulder before padding off to the far end of the garden, where it sat with an air of petulant challenge, a military tilt to its jaw.

  ‘Look at him,’ said the Tattooed Man. ‘Look at the bastard.’

  ‘I’ll get him,’ Jon volunteered. The Tattooed Man shook his head and said, ‘Sod him. Let him freeze,’ and closed the door.

  Jon followed him to the front of the house, where one of his drivers was lounging in front of the television. As they entered, he grabbed the remote control and hit the mute button. He acknowledged Jon with a small nod before facing the Tattooed Man.

  ‘Do me a favour, Phil,’ said the Tattooed Man. ‘The bloody dog’s playing up again. Give him ten minutes and let him in, will you?’

  Phil nodded. ‘Will do.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He turned as if to leave. ‘What are your hours tonight?’

  ‘I’m on till eight,’ said Phil.

  ‘Right you are,’ said the Tattooed Man.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Phil, and turned the television up. The sounds of televised boxing faded behind them as Jon followed the Tattooed Man through to the silent heart of the house, a library of rich, dark mahogany. Leather-bound books stretched to the high ceiling. The spines of some, high in the shadows, had grown white with mould which partially obscured Latin titles stamped in tarnished gold leaf.

  Jon pulled a high-backed chair to the enormous reading table as the Tattooed Man produced a decanter and two tumblers. He poured whisky that had the colour of honey and the consistency of mercury. He pushed a glass across the table and sat back, massaging his lower lip between thumb and forefinger. ‘How did it go?’

  Jon sipped whisky. It cut through his drunkenness like a burst of intense light. He told the Tattooed Man all about it.

  Sweating and trying to scream and mesmerised by his eyes. The impressive gush of black, rich with corruption and thick with the secretions of his earthy life; soiling himself as his hands clawed and crabbed and twitched. And the final burst of intense purity that passed into Jon like a rush of heroin, like wings bursting from his back.

  When he had done, the alarm on his watch sounded, like impish giggling.

  The Tattooed Man pulled open a drawer and withdrew the parcel of velvet and leather which contained his works. Neither man spoke again until the Tattooed Man, veins livid on a wiry arm, released the tourniquet with his teeth and let loose an orgasmic grunt, ejaculating blood into the syringe in a single smooth effluvient.

  Some time passed. Jon smoked a cigarette. The Tattooed Man gazed at the ceiling and through it. He offered the syringe, his blood congealed like rust along the length of its needle. Jon took it, laid it on the table and reached for the rest of the works, the spoon, the cotton gauze and the lighter. With a flick of the wrist the Tattooed Man pushed across a foil envelope. It nearly overshot the table, saved only by a clumsy lunge and a lucky shift of weight. Jon wiped a fleck of spit from the corner of his mouth and wordlessly began to prepare the injection. The Tattooed Man watched silently until, as blood oozed forth to fill the vacuum, he said, ‘Bad blood,’ and smiled, paternal and bestial.

  After some time, Jon reached for his drink, succeeding only in knocking and nearly toppling it. His hand was the colour of pork fat. A lazy, amber droplet ran down the side of the tumbler, negotiating the gradations and contours of its relief, settling in a bead on the dark wood of the table.

  He wiped viscous, white saliva from his mouth. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small bundle of kitchen paper secured with black insulation tape. It was stained by a dark circle that lightened towards the edges, fading eventually to cheap, dirty pink.

  The Tattooed Man rubbed sweat from the tips of his fingers with his thumb, took the parcel and tugged at the tape which bound it. He gazed at the contents and exhaled a luxurious, appreciative breath. Then he looked at Jon and said, ‘Me and my mementos.’

  Jon wiped his palms on his shirt and did not answer, except to mutter, ‘Bad voodoo.’

  The Tattooed Man placed his trophy in the drawer and pushed it closed.

  Jon did not know how long he and the Tattooed Man spent together that night. Time took on a peculiar quality, and he could not judge the passage of what seemed unmoving, to have happened not as a sequence of events but as a dawning revelation that he felt he had always known, could not imagine not knowing. At some point the Tattooed Man said, ‘I’ll have you driven home,’ and was at his shoulder, helping him to his feet, supporting his weight.

  He led Jon to the hallway, where Phil was still sitting smoking his way through a pack of Benson & Hedges, reading a pornographic Japanese comic, which he stuffed into his pocket as he stood. Phil had a lean face in which were etched all the worry lines of an industrial ancestry, but his hair was an incongruously cherubic tangle and his eyes were the colour of bleached denim.

  The Tattooed Man patted the back of Jon’s neck and opened the door for him. ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘Here you go. Get yourself to bed.’

  Jon could barely feel his lips. His eyes were smoky and dry. The light in the hallway was too bright. His feet were a long way away.

  Phil jingled his keys.

  The Tattooed Man touched Jon’s shoulder. ‘Sleep with the light on,’ he said, then led him by the elbow over the threshold. It was the darkest and most silent part of the night. As Phil passed him, the Tattooed Man grabbed his sleeve and quietly said, ‘Look after him, Phil,’ before closing the door.

  Phil made no attempt at conversation. Jon sat beside him, his eyes glazed and his jaw slack like a caricature of an idiot. His head bobbed loosely when the car hit a pothole. Phil helped him to his door, and taking Jon’s weight on his shoulder, fished around for the keys in Jon’s coat pocket. The Jaguar sat predatory and sleek, purring in the darkness of the empty road behind them.

  ‘Thanks, Phil,’ murmured Jon.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ hissed Phil in a late-night whisper, fiddling with the lock.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ slurred Jon, as Phil slipped out from under his arm.

  ‘You�
�re Jon,’ said Phil.

  ‘No, who I really am,’ said Jon.

  Phil opened the door and helped Jon inside. ‘All right, Jon,’ he said. ‘Shush now. Quiet, now. Let’s get you in and to bed.’

  Jon stumbled over the threshold.

  ‘Do you need any more help?’ said Phil.

  Jon shook his head, leaning against the wall.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Phil. He made a comical face as Jon closed the door on him. Then, jingling his keys, he walked to the car.

  Jon fell against the wall. He stumbled to the kitchen and threw up in the shining sink, running the tap to wash away the thin bile. Then, beneath the frigid glare of the strip light, he stripped naked, and, shuddering in flurries that made his teeth click, walked through the lifeless front room, up the stairs, and into the Oblivion Suite.

  2

  For Ever and a Day

  It was in the bleak midsummer that the timeless threads of his life began to tie together, to make something strange and half-familiar. It was a small coincidence, but it was a small coincidence in which he perceived the machinations of something impersonal and terrible.

  On a Saturday afternoon, on his way to Fat Dave’s, Jon’s passage was blocked by a small crowd that had coagulated about an old man who lay half-spilled into the road. His legs were awkwardly folded beneath him and one trouser leg was hiked up his shin, revealing a brown, ribbed poly-cotton sock gathered in a pool about his hairless, very white ankle. It was clear that he was dead, despatched perhaps by a heart attack merciful in its instantaneous savagery. Nobody in the crowd, which gazed at the corpse with bovine vacancy, had either attempted first aid or called an ambulance. Instead they scabbed around him like paid mourners or village idiots. Jon tried to squeeze through them, causing a domino-spread of awkwardly corrected balances, and was struck in the cheek by an elbow, for which he received the mantric apology, ‘Oh shit. Sorry mate,’ to which there was but one possible reply, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ as he shouldered on. Something within him recognised the voice even before the man reached out and touched his shoulder. Its tone touched a dizzying string of recognition and connotation and in the passage of half a second, as he turned to face the man, he was bombarded by the memory of smells and sounds that belonged to another life.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Andy’s voice broke to a fragile falsetto on the final syllable. ‘Jon?’

  Jon looked into familiar eyes, the eyes of a boy set in a man’s flesh, eyes that had crossed time. He smiled without knowing if the smile was genuine or merely a Pavlovian reaction, a deep association of this face with the act of smiling. ‘Hello, Andy,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  They pushed from the crowd and faced each other.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Andy in the same strangled falsetto. ‘Look at you. You grew up.’

  For the first time in many years, Jon thought he might cry for what he had become. Instead, he shrugged, the smile stiff on his lips. ‘Not so you’d notice,’ he lied.

  There was too much to be said, things to be explained, excuses to be made. There was nowhere to begin. There was not enough time, or too much. Unspoken memories: youthful dreams of escape.

  ‘Listen,’ said Jon, and a cloud passed over the insipid summer sun. Distantly, the sound of an approaching ambulance. ‘Do you fancy a pint? If you’re not too busy.’

  Andy’s hesitation was slight, but it cut through Jon like cheese­wire. ‘Of course I’m not too busy.’

  They walked in uncomfortable silence the few hundred metres to the pub, masking their awkwardness with cigarettes. Once, Jon caught their reflection in a shop window, and was sad.

  The pub was an old man’s place; dark and quiet, pools coupons, dogs curled at Hush-Puppied feet. They walked to the bar.

  ‘What are you having, then?’

  ‘Put your money away,’ said Andy. ‘The first one’s on me, mate.’

  He tried not to notice that Andy paid with a pile of loose change, counting out the coppers and silver after excavating three tarnished pound coins. They sat in a quiet corner and silently supped the heads from their drinks.

  ‘The first pint I ever drank in a pub was with you,’ said Jon eventually. ‘Remember? It was in the Crown and I was sick.’

  ‘Of course I remember. Two pints of cider and “whuff”.’ He made a vomiting sound then blushed and sipped gently, and looked up from the glass. He wore a moustache of froth. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘That was your first time in a pub? You used to tell me that you drank in pubs all the time.’

  ‘I was lying. You were always in pubs and I felt stupid.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t. I’d had a couple of halves with my old man before Sunday lunch, that was all.’

  Jon bristled. ‘You used to tell me that you and your dad used to drink in there every Wednesday night. You were on the darts team or something.’

  ‘I was trying to be grown up.’

  Jon produced his cigarettes, offered them. Andy accepted with a self-reflective smile. ‘And if you wouldn’t have started me on these,’ he said, ‘I might have been able to give them up by now.’

  Jon made a face of exaggerated incredulity. ‘You used to smoke like a chimney.’

  ‘Only because I thought I looked cool when I was lighting up. I used to give myself a terrible headache.’

  ‘And you could always tell when you’d nicked your mum’s,’ said Jon, ‘because she smoked menthol and you’d put them in a Benson & Hedges packet, and when people asked you why the filter was white you said they were duty-free.’

  Andy groaned, his hand across his mouth.

  ‘How is your mum?’ said Jon.

  ‘Oh, she’s fine. Still the same. Does the bingo.’

  ‘And your old man?’

  Andy drew hard on the cigarette. ‘Just the fucking same.’

  ‘You don’t see them much, then?’

  ‘I take the kid round to mum’s on a Saturday afternoon when the old man’s out on the piss.’

  Jon let this sink in.

  ‘The kid?’

  Andy shook his head and beamed in pride, more, Jon thought, for the power of revelation than the satisfactions of fatherhood. ‘A girl. Kirsty. She’s nearly three.’

  ‘Kids. Jesus. You’re married then?’

  ‘Seven years. Remember Cathy Reynolds? In the year below us?’

  ‘Cathy Reynolds? After that night with the phone you used to deny you even fancied her!’

  ‘Well I did fancy her. Bumped into her a couple of years after I last saw you and one thing led to another, y’know. Bob’s your uncle. Married with a kid. Before I knew it.’

  After I last saw you. As if the parting had been a watershed: the passage from one world to another.

  ‘What about George and Mildred?’ This had been Andy’s name for Jon’s foster parents, and they had loved him for his innocent cockiness in using it, for the fondness it implied. The unique power of names. When Andy was around they had referred to one another thus, ‘George, it’s Andy for our Jon.’ ‘I’ll put the kettle on for him, Mildred.’ ‘Sit yourself down, Andy. George’ll make you a cup of tea.’

  ‘They’re dead,’ said Jon.

  Jon found the loss in Andy’s face hard to bear. He was uncomfortably certain that Andy had for a moment entertained the notion of turning up on their doorstep, a pushchair in one hand and the toddler in the other, greeting them with a smile and ‘Hello George, hello Mildred,’ achieving a kind of continuity, a sense of himself as the boy of whom they had been so fond, grown older but unchanged in essence, still eminently recognisable.

  ‘Oh, Christ, Jon. I’m sorry, mate. When?’

  Jon shrugged and smiled bloodlessly. ‘It must be ten years.’

  ‘Ten years?

  ‘Time flies.’ He said this in a half stoop, standing and draining his pint. ‘Same again?’

  When he returned, Andy had his head in his hands. He looked up and rubbed his eyes. ‘Ten years.’ He took the pint. ‘How long has it been since I saw you?’<
br />
  ‘I don’t know. A long time. Years.’

  ‘Eleven?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘No, it must be eleven,’ Andy said. ‘You were there on my twentieth. Remember? Lee Clarke took a beating on the way to the pub.’

  ‘That was your nineteenth.’

  ‘It could have been. I don’t suppose a year either way makes much difference.’

  They knew this was not true.

  Silence.

  ‘So what have you been doing for eleven or twelve years?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Getting married. Having a kid. What about you?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘The last I heard you were going to university.’

  ‘That wasn’t to be.’

  ‘What stopped you? You were always the brainy one. We all thought you’d end up being a doctor or something.’

  Old dreams. ‘You know how it is. Things happen.’

  Andy let it pass. ‘So what do you do, since you didn’t grow up to be a doctor?’

  Jon shifted in his seat. In the far corner an old man sent up a cry of delight as the fruit machine hacked up a small handful of coins. He began to pump them straight back in. ‘Nothing much. I make a few quid here and a few quid there.’

  ‘I know you,’ said Andy. ‘I bet you’re making a killing on the quiet.’

  The second pint disappeared quickly. Jon said, ‘Same again?’

  ‘No. It’s my shout.’

  That meagre pile of coins. Andy’s incipient embarrassment. ‘Come off it. You’ve got a wife and kid to support.’

  Andy looked briefly irritated. ‘I can afford a couple of pints.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. I’m flush. I had a bit of a win last night.’ It was not quite a lie: he would have won had he played Fat Dave and his friends that afternoon. ‘What’s it to be? Same again or what?’

  Andy sighed. ‘Go on then. Cheers.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Jon upon his return, setting the glasses on the table, ‘I never paid back that twenty quid you lent me to impress Michelle Thompson.’