by Neil Cross
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 selfconscious, 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 T
attooed 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.
‘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.
&n
bsp; ‘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.
