by Neil Cross
He was cold, and hugging himself produced no warmth. He ran the tap and poured a tooth-mug full of stale water, painstakingly rinsing his mouth although his etiolated frame begged to bend to the lightly musical flow, to let the water pass uninterrupted into his cramped gut, to let the urgency of osmosis spread in a visible bloom of colour from his guts to the soles of his feet and the curve of his skull, to inflate the withered lobes of his ears and mother-of-pearl nails. Obscurely, he longed for the taste of vinegar. For a delirious moment, in which he had to extend a hand to the cistern to steady himself he was visited by two images, sufficiently intense as to be hallucinatory. They were simultaneous, like one piece of scratched film played over another. He heard the parched, crucified Christ beg for water, for release from his torment, only to be mocked by a sponge soaked in bitter vinegar. He saw the American soldiers who, upon arrival in Dachau, numbed by the horror that had transpired there, brought with them a talismanic offering, a fragment of the reality in which they had believed and which this terrible place had proved a lie. Young men who had travelled across the sea to witness history spasm and twist in ways no God could have allowed, offered to colourless, hairless skeletons in striped rags and wooden clogs the gay talisman of American candy bars. Half-human, wretched things, whose presence in such a place made them appear in newsreel as ghostly, saintly creatures with eyes that testified not to the fact but the meaning of what had happened there, were offered chocolate bars. There was no JHVH to avenge them nor Christ to caress their shaved and fleshless heads with hands wounded in the name of all who had died here and all who had killed. Instead there was American candy. Out of the mighty came forth sweetness. The sweetness of freedom, the primary coloured gospel of abundance, of a mythical place where goodness was enough and innocence sacred. Although starved for so long, although deprived of sweetness of any kind, the survivors had no need of American candy. Instead they asked for vinegar because they craved the familiar bitterness of that which was used to mock Christ in his death agonies.
Jon had an image of a young soldier, so intense the rips and stains and repairs in the boy’s uniform could be discerned, the scuffs in the leather of his boots, not yet old enough to shave, yet who had encountered carnage on a scale hitherto undreamed, gazing at the unwanted candy bar in his hand. He saw there the true nature of the horror which would never leave his dreams. He had never seen this image, either in newsreel or newspaper, but knew none the less that it was true. For a moment he felt the whisper of the soldier’s ghost pass through him like a breeze, raising a thrill of goose bumps the length of his spine. He knew that it was the weight of such memories, of things that should never have been which happened on a scale that should not have been possible, which had somehow formed the creature that he was. He thought for the remains of that giddy moment that he might be an angel, an agent of vengeance against those who had used up all the love there was and rotted in a miasmic superfluity of hatred and wilful idiocy. He thought of the Tattooed Man and longed to curl himself beneath that fierce and paternal arm and find solace there. The hallucination faded.
He ran his head beneath the tap, cursing and spluttering, then allowed himself to swallow a mouthful of water.
He showered, washing the dried faecal matter from his inner thighs and buttocks and the blood from his forehead, hands and feet. Clear-headed beneath the massaging flow, he supposed that in the passion of hallucination, he had clawed the marks of Christ into his own flesh and was glad that the thing which felt such things had left him.
As the daylight gathered strength, it became clear that the damp summer had slipped into another winter that was little more than an administrative convenience, the bureaucratic memory of seasonal shift. The evenings would be darker and the meagre drizzle would become not so much colder as marginally more irritating. The planet, meanwhile, continued to wobble unsteadily about its fat axis like an alcoholic bag woman. He saw through the window that most of the leaves had fallen from the tree in his neighbour’s garden, and those few that remained were gold and russet and as good as dead. The world was the washed-out grey of a bad water-colour.
After showering and towelling dry he took a set of electric hair-clippers and shaved his head to an eighth of an inch of stubble. Then he lathered and shaved his new beard. The reflected face he saw displayed nothing but the most academic interest in itself. Shaved and drained of personality, it might have belonged to a demonic statue churned up by a spade or a boot in the deserts of the Middle East.
It was some time before he was fit enough to leave the house, which he would not do until the full sense of solidity in the world had returned to him. For days he continued to slip into mildly hallucinatory states, which were marked by an uncharacteristic willingness to make metaphysical suppositions. He heard voices in the corners and saw movement in the periphery of his vision. He imposed on himself a regime of bastardised yoga. The muscle fibre beneath his skin had the consistency of wire rope coiled about itself, like a nest of cybernetic snakes. The small puckered wounds that dotted his shoulder and upper arm had begun the slow fade from rude purple to the lividity of white scar tissue. He felt like he had sucked time into himself, solidified it by exercise of an ego-less will.
When he was ready, he dressed and jingled his keys in his pocket as he stepped outside. Cars drove past and did not register that he existed. Strangers passed him on the street, and did not guess that he had for a time stepped out of the world. A mongrel pissed against the stem of a lamp-post and did not whimper and scuttle from him. He had to sidestep to avoid curled turds and deep roadside puddles that a bus might run through, soaking him. He carried a handwritten list in his pocket that read ‘batteries, shaving-foam, new razors’, because for some reason these were things he often forgot to buy. He waited at the corner while the traffic passed, then, when the red man was replaced by his green counterpart, he crossed amidst a small crowd of others. In the shop he thought he had the right change but didn’t, and after painstakingly counting out coppers, found himself eight pence short. He checked all his pockets in turn before producing a twenty-pound note and some clucks of impatience from the queue behind him. Walking back into the world was like walking into a sandstorm. There was no way to protect yourself from it. A composite of sheer, abundant power and insidious intrusiveness, it found every crack and crevice. By the time he lit his first cigarette, what he had undergone began to seem distant. He wondered at the fact that the wounds of Christ had reduced him to tears, although he knew that Christ had been nothing more than another revolutionary megalomaniac who died mocked and deserted, unable to make sense even of his own suffering. Whatever it was that had been in him, leading him to believe such things, had passed away into the private infinity of the Oblivion Suite.
When he got home, he opened all the windows in the house to let out the dead smell, put the shopping in the cupboards (neat ranks of tins and sauces and bottles, labels forward), then phoned Andy. The phone was answered on the fifth ring. He heard the clearing of a feminine throat, slightly impatient, a half-whispered, ‘Hello?’
‘Hello Cathy wassname from the year below,’ he said. ‘It’s Jon.’
He heard her smile, found himself picturing her eyes folding into crow’s-feet at the corners, her scrubbed skin, her hair pulled into a practical but deliberate and neat ponytail. The faint smell of baby on her clothes. He was a little surprised to find out that he was smiling in response.
‘Where have you been?’ She spoke in the same cracked whisper, exasperation and perhaps, he thought, surprised pleasure raising its tone half an octave. ‘We thought you’d been kidnapped by aliens or something. Andy’s been out of his mind with worry.’ She stifled a laugh. ‘Pacing up and down the room calling you a bastard and wondering where you’d gone.’
He laughed. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.’
A muffled snort, like a hand was pressed across her mouth between the receiver and her lips. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered, ‘I’ve just got the little one to
sleep.’
‘She’s not ill, I hope.’
‘No, just a bad-tempered little madam. Where have you been?’
‘Not far. I’ll explain when I see you both. How are things?’
This time he heard or thought he saw her smile spread right across her face, dimples in her cheeks, and he knew that her eyes twinkled within their nest of crow’s-feet. Oddly, he thought of Father Christmas. Although her answer was confined to a single word, ‘Yeah,’ Jon was almost shocked at the depth of fondness he heard there. He wanted her to say ‘Yeah’ like that while Andy stood at her side, with his burgeoning beer gut and his thinning hair and his wispy gingery-blonde moustache, and he wanted to be able to smile back and hold them at arm’s length, one shoulder each, and look in their eyes and see himself reflected there. He very badly wanted nothing bad ever to happen to either of them. He did not want for them ever to have to say anything but ‘yeah’ in that precise tone of voice ever again.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I don’t know if you realised, but it’s Andy’s birthday a week Tuesday. Next Saturday we’re having a bit of a do round our place. Not much: you know, Kirsty at my mum’s, a few friends round. Andy would be chuffed to nuts if you were there. He really would.’
His hand was cold round the phone. ‘Of course I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘The last time I celebrated one of Andy’s birthday’s he was about half as old …’
‘And half as fat,’ she finished. He could smell her perfume, a warmth just beneath and behind the lobes of her ears, and Andy’s smell, fresh sweat and grease that was ingrained into the whorls of his hands.
‘What time?’
‘Any time. Seven. Half past.’
After confirming, he ran out of things to say. He had nothing to talk about. He wasn’t even sure what day it was. He found himself wondering why he had phoned when Andy would obviously be at the very job Jon himself had acquired for him. There was a curious feeling in his stomach.
With the phone back in its cradle, he perched on the edge of the coffee table watching a triangle of light cast by a window shift slowly across the carpet. He thought about himself. When this was no longer absorbing, he walked to the bookshelf and surveyed the ranked volumes which the Tattooed Man had given him. Some were handsome hardback editions, some of them, he knew, worth some money, while others were cheap paperbacks apparently picked up on a whim. He thought of the Tattooed Man queuing in W.H. Smith’s, a paperback in one hand, a packet of mints in the other and a Daily Telegraph folded beneath his arm, while those queuing before him and those queuing behind him did not suspect for an instant the nature of the thing in whose shadow they stood. He smiled fondly. The book he chose was one of these paperbacks, one which fell open at a particular page, as if the Tattooed Man had passed on a well-used volume. It was perhaps another of the self-referential in-jokes that brought the Tattooed Man such evident pleasure: Milton’s Paradise Lost. Jon let the book fall open in his hand. One line was underlined, and in the margin next to it was a meticulously inscribed exclamation mark. ‘Which way I fly is hell,’ it read; ‘Myself am hell.’
This time, Jon thought he might get the joke.
He arrived at Andy’s and Cathy’s at ten o’clock in the evening because he wished to avoid any possibility of being the first to arrive. The thought of sitting with the two of them, excited and a little apprehensive, anxious that all would go well, making stilted conversation which fell silent every time a car slowed outside, filled him with a dread whose depths knew no bounds. He had actually woken in the middle of the night in a clammy sweat at the thought of it.
He could hear the music from half-way down the street. There were lights flashing in time with the bass drum, intermittently illuminating the living-room window, behind the darkness of which he could discern shifting figures. There was already a smattering of pleasantly strained, atonal singing rising above the music. The song he recognised as a 1970s’ disco hit to which, at his first school disco, he had tried to dance. He had been so heroically inept at producing anything even vaguely recognisable as what might, even with charitable intention and in the dark, be called a dance, that—as he devoted the entirety of his concentration to willing his arms, legs and hips not only to do what he wanted them to, but to do it in a co-ordinated fashion and, if possible, in time—his schoolmates, one by one, had stopped dancing and gathered in an awe-struck circle about him. His ineptitude was such that his audience which, after all, was comprised of adolescents whose savage sense of humour knows nothing of the sensibilities of others, were struck dumb for the duration of the song, which perchance, was called ‘He’s the Greatest Dancer (that I’ve ever seen)’. As it faded to silence, somebody (he never knew who) said, in a paradigm of perfect comic timing, ‘I bet his mum does the laundry by throwing him in the bath with it and turning the radio on.’
He hadn’t been the kind of sensitive child driven to solitude and ultimately adult bitterness by such an event. He had forced himself to laugh along because he perceived, accurately as it turned out, that this would be the best way to diffuse the situation, a pre-emptive strike against the prolonged agonies that would follow a public display of humiliation, of being a little boy in front of all those little girls who at the time seemed like impossible, unattainable ideals of Womanhood. Still, he had never danced publicly again. Possibly he was saved from the worst traumas of adolescence by the fact that by the age of thirteen he had spent a good deal of his life in institutional care.
This train of thought, the association of images and smells led from thoughts of events once so important, now sufficiently distant to be gently amusing, invoked other, gentler memories: as an adolescent Andy had danced with an utterly arrhythmic yet blatantly unselfconscious series of pneumatic thrusts and wiggles. Somehow he convinced all who gazed in wonderment upon him that this obscurely pornographic series of jerks and grunts was actually dancing. He carefully calculated his entrance to school discos, which were held in the sports hall. He swaggered in late, brandishing a half-bottle of vodka which he had taken great pains to smuggle in with the express intention of producing it as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and from which he swigged with fire in his throat but impassive stoicism on his face. For a while he wore the worst footballer’s perm Jon had ever seen. He had bought the kit from Boots one Saturday, and when it had gone awry had called in maternal aid. He looked, Jon recalled, like an absolute wanker. With his disastrous hair, blue shoes and ecstatic pelvic thrusts, Jon actually used to feel sorry for him on such occasions, until the night when, extraordinarily, Andy lost his virginity. What had really rankled Jon is that they’d taken out a bet on that very occurrence. ‘Tonight’s the night,’ said Andy. ‘Now or never, innit?’
‘A tenner on it,’ said Jon amicably, making no attempt to hide his scepticism. To plan the loss of one’s virginity was a quixotic crusade indeed. Come midnight he was in debt to Andy to the tune of forty-five pounds. Only six months later (six months representing a considerable passage of time to teenage boys, for whom the transition from climbing trees to obsessive interest in the cut of one’s trousers might measure to the outside world the length of perhaps one Easter holiday, while representing to the subject an almost geological time-shift), Andy himself had been horrified at what he called his ‘Kevin Keegan stage’. He referred to it, under duress, in an embarrassed mutter, and always qualified it away into nothingness with surprisingly creditable sociological contextualisation: ‘Everyone dressed like that. It was fashion, innit?’, and so on and so forth, until his embarrassment became so palpable the subject was changed. He had the perm cut into what he considered to be a kind of punk look, but not so much as to upset his mum, and which nevertheless resembled, for a period at least, nothing other than a radically trimmed home perm. Once, a group of them, drinks barely touched, was forced to leave a pub because Andy caught sight of the girl to whom he had lost his innocence and by whose favour he so extravagantly won a bet. He didn’t want to speak to her. He was embarrass
ed. He was ashamed. Not by any of the usual catalogue of post-adolescent cringeworthy memories, premature ejaculation, terror-stricken, limp penis, Marks & Spencer’s underwear with a Yogi Bear legend revealed to history at the bottom of a school field. He was embarrassed about the clothes he had been wearing. Jon suspected that his disproportionate shame about the Kevin Keegan period actually constituted a genuine trauma in his life. It was one of the key events by which he would always understand and measure himself.
As Jon walked up the short garden path, he remembered that he had actually owned some photos of Andy wearing that very disreputable bubble-cut. Although, like the Tattooed Man, he had always been compelled to preserve any image of the past, he had ripped them into tiny pieces which he burned in an ashtray until they were nothing but ash. It was a solemn occasion, a proof to Jon of the depth of his friendship. He had forgotten all about it.
