Mr. In-Between

by Neil Cross

  Phil lightly took Jon’s shoulder and led him, hushing him silent, away from the house, past the oddly parked cars, to the darkness cast by an enormous, twisted old oak tree. He offered Jon a cigarette. ‘What did you think of that albino?’ he asked in a whisper so cautiously quiet he had to lean into Jon’s ear to be heard.

  Jon shrugged.

  ‘Come on,’ hissed Phil.

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Jon in an equally ragged whisper. He had the odd feeling that the albino was standing at his shoulder, grinning.

  Phil lit another cigarette from the stub of the first. ‘He put the fucking wind up me, I know that,’ he said. ‘He gave me the right fucking creeps.’

  They looked to the cottage. A shadow passed across the window.

  ‘Come on,’ said Jon, and led Phil back to the Aston. They leaned against it, smoking, occasionally glancing at Martin, who sat perfectly still and stiff behind the wheel of a Jaguar, and glancing now and again at the cottage. Once or twice they heard distant, soft laughter.

  ‘I wonder who walked,’ said Phil.

  ‘What?’

  ‘One of them must have walked here. One of them must have. Not enough cars.’ He glanced over his shoulder, distantly troubled.

  ‘Perhaps one of them,’ whispered Jon, ‘accepted a lift. Perhaps one of them lives here. I don’t know.’

  Phil looked at him and shook his head eloquently once. ‘Oh, fuck this,’ he concluded. ‘Do you fancy a game of cards?’

  Phil strode to the Jaguar, hands in pockets, and kneeling at the driver’s side window rapped on it with a knuckle. Although the window slid smoothly down, Martin gazed steadfastly ahead. Only an involuntary tic in his cheek betrayed an awareness of Phil’s presence.

  ‘Fancy a game of cards?’ Phil asked.

  Martin slid his eyes sideways. ‘Fuck off,’ he repeated through tight lips. The window slid silently closed.

  Phil stood from the crouch and laughed. He spread his hands. ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked.

  Jon nodded that he had.

  ‘He’ll get nowhere with that attitude,’ said Phil. He rapped on the window and said, ‘Did you hear that? You’ll get nowhere with that attitude.’ Martin contrived to ignore him still. Phil seemed to find this hilarious.

  He and Jon sat in the back of the Aston, spreading the cards between them. With the joker Jon arranged a generous line of cocaine. Shadows moved back and forth across the cottage window, backlit and projected in silhouette across the curtains. Once they heard a raised voice, though what was said neither could discern. The tone of the voice was ambiguous. Neither Phil nor Jon mentioned it. Another time a voice that clearly belonged to the Tattooed Man barked in what sounded like a foreign language, guttural and full of glottal stops. Perhaps it was a joke, because the albino’s voice responded with a laugh. Then silence fell again.

  After some time, the cottage door opened. The albino stepped outside, pausing as if to take a deep lungful of fresh air. He walked to the Aston, from which Jon obligingly stepped. ‘You might as well stay where you are, Phil,’ the albino said.

  ‘Righty-ho,’ said Phil.

  ‘While you’re here, Phil,’ said the albino, ‘keep an eye on the Aryan gentleman over there, would you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He’s a laugh a minute, our Martin, isn’t he?’

  Phil answered with a laugh that was a touch too enthusiastic.

  The albino adjusted his blazer and motioned with his head for Jon to follow. As Jon pushed the door of the cottage closed behind him, he had to fight an urge to yank it open again and run blindly into the night.

  ‘We’d like a word,’ said the albino.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ Jon said.

  The albino ruffled Jon’s hair like a schoolboy. ‘Far from it,’ he announced. ‘Nothing of the sort. Don’t let the thought enter your mind.’

  The albino stooped a little further, hung over Jon’s shoulder like the big bad wolf. Jon could sense the smile widening. Eyes the intense but passionless red of moulded plastic. An exhalation of hot breath, the albino standing to his full height, laughing. ‘He said you were an honest man, Jon,’ he confided. ‘He said you were the most dedicated he’d ever had. I can see why he loves you.’ His teeth were too long. The inside of his mouth and his rolling tongue were rich and moist against the colourless purity of his skin. His broad forehead knitted. ‘You’re everything I’ve heard you were.’

  Mr Michaelmas took the handle of the door to the front room in his massive hand, and pulled it open. Darkness spilled from the room and wrapped itself around him before rolling languidly along the hallway. Its passage made weak the electric glow of the lampshades. There was a displacement of air, as if something had rushed from the room to cower behind him. The Tattooed Man stepped from the room and softly closed the door behind him.

  Oddly, the first thing that Jon noticed was that in his hand he held a syringe. Oddly, because the Tattooed Man was naked. His penis, distended but not fully erect, hung arrogantly across his scrotum. A thick blue vein ran to his glans, upon which a golden stud twinkled in the half-light. He was utterly hairless. His skin shrink-wrapped sinew and hard, shifting muscle.

  Jon took a step back and regarded him in silent consternation. The Tattooed Man allowed himself to be gazed upon, smiling indulgently. The albino restricted his attention to scrutinising Jon’s reaction. Jon felt giddy: the Tattooed Man, naked and ironically unashamed, his feet sunk in the soft pile of the corridor of a country cottage, floral wallpaper behind him, his earring glinting with the horse brasses. Jon could not look away.

  Toe to wrist, wrist to neck, the Tattooed Man’s skin was decorated by indelibly etched faces, to which the ripple of muscle lent the illusion of animation. He was tattooed with hundreds of faces, each of them rendered with uncommon skill. Row upon row of faces, a seamless chain mail of portraits. Adult and child, male and female. Among them were dozens of recognisable renditions of his own features, now as a child, now as a young man. Many of the others wore the expression of corpses photographed in a shadowless mortuary. Still others were more sensitive, even sentimental, with the melancholy gaze of faded Victorian sepia. There was no dermis left. He had run out of skin before he had run out of time. Only his wrists, hands and head above the neckline were untattooed. He showed Jon the syringe. ‘Succinylcholine,’ he said. ‘Ten milligrammes for each fifty pounds of body weight produces instant paralysis. For about ten minutes, before the victim’s respiratory system gives out, he can experience every second of what’s done to him. With the added bonus of complete immobility.’

  The albino laughed. His grip grew firm on Jon’s shoulders and all expression fell from his face. ‘There are places which one should enter only of one’s free will,’ he said. He pointed at the door. ‘In there. Do you understand the nature of freedom, Jon?’

  He awaited a response, which was not forthcoming.

  ‘There is a single choice which determines the course of your life entire,’ the albino told him. ‘You elect to jump or allow yourself to be pushed. Those who elect to jump are of course free to choose in which direction.’

  The Tattooed Man smiled at Jon. It seemed incongruously natural. Relax, the smile said. It’s all right.

  ‘Do you understand what freedom is?’ petitioned the albino. ‘Do you know what a terrible and precious thing it is?’

  Jon nodded that he did.

  The albino stepped to one side and made an expansive gesture of welcome, opening the door and ushering Jon inside. There was the smell of burning fat.

  He was aware of the Tattooed Man’s hand resting gently and reassuringly on his shoulder.

  Phil watched the darkened windows of the cottage until curiosity became frustration, then eventually an ambiguous mix of concern and a sense of exclusion. He flicked endless cigarette butts absently on to the gravel. He was intermittently aware of the blond man in the Jaguar watching him in the rear-view mirror.

  After the passage of so
me hours, Jon appeared in the doorway and walked to the Aston. He carried a spade in his hand.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been all night?’ said Phil.

  ‘In there,’ said Jon with an unfamiliar grin.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Phil sulked. He rolled his eyes. ‘Be like that.’ He nodded at the Jag, in which Martin could be seen to be watching them. ‘Do you think he likes me or what?’ he asked lightly. For some reason, Phil felt it to be important that he make Jon laugh.

  ‘Do you want to take care of him?’ said Jon. ‘Or do you want me to do it?’

  Phil’s hand was at the door handle. ‘Are you joking?’ He stood on the gravel, leaning against the car as he stretched his cramped legs. He flexed his fists, withdrew a pistol from an inside pocket and walked to the old Jag. He stooped low at the window and, as Martin contrived once more to fix him with a supercilious sneer, he smashed the driver’s window with the butt of his pistol. He leaned awkwardly through the hole. Martin threw his hands across his head and his self across the seats in an effort to avoid Phil’s clumsy blows. Phil wriggled from the window, snagging his jacket on jagged glass, and opened the car door. He grabbed Martin’s ankle and yanked, once, twice, three times. Martin spilled like a new-born calf from car to gravel. Phil let him struggle to his knees before striking him on the jaw with the butt of the gun. As he groaned and curled on the floor, Phil kicked him and kicked him and kicked him. After a minute or so, Phil paused to catch his breath. He lit a cigarette, took a puff or two and finished the job in a more leisurely fashion. Martin began to crawl on his belly. His shirt lifted clear of his trousers, gathering about his chest. Phil walked alongside him, kicking him occasionally and bending to sneer into his ear. Eventually Jon tired and, sighing, walked to Martin, who was prone on the floor, bleeding from both ears. With the blade of the shovel, Jon hit him in the base of the skull. He began to twitch and jerk, spilling gravel this way and that. He made circles and arcs that reminded Jon of a Japanese garden. Phil prodded the corpse with the toe of his shoe.

  ‘Wanker,’ he concluded.

  Jon handed him the shovel.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Phil. He looked at the body and sagged.

  Jon clapped him on the shoulder. ‘That’s not all,’ he said. ‘Remember the fat man …?’

  The cottage was a place of fairy-tale innocence. Furniture and carpets had been replaced. The four men unwound with glasses of whisky and whatever passed among them for light conversation. With a degree of difficulty, Jon and Phil dragged the body of the fat man, wrapped in a length of tarpaulin, behind the house and into the darkness where the woods began. The grave took a long time to dig. The earth was soft and moist, but the hole was deep and wide. They rolled the fat man’s body into its maw. Jon straightened, bones clicking in his spine. It was four a.m.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Fill it up and disguise it. The boss wants to be driven home about dawn, so if you’re snappy you’ll have time to take forty winks.’

  Phil spat into the hole. ‘What about you?’

  Jon retrieved his jacket from the branch upon which he’d hung it.

  ‘Shit,’ said Phil. ‘Don’t leave me alone. I hate the fucking dark. It gives me the fucking creeps.’

  Jon smiled.

  Phil looked sour. ‘Say a prayer to the baby Jesus for me.’

  As he trudged back down the field, Jon could hear him muttering as he shovelled earth: ‘As I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.’

  Jon dragged Martin into a weighted sack, and took a moment or two quickly to sew the lips closed. He dragged the parcel across the gravel and heaved it into the boot of the old Jaguar. When he had closed the lid, he snorted the last of the cocaine. He strode back to the cottage and into the front room.

  ‘You’re filthy,’ said the Tattooed Man. ‘Watch where you step.’

  Jon retreated to the threshold. ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘No,’ said the Tattooed Man. ‘Do what has to be done and you can knock off. I’ll be in touch.’

  The albino offered a cool, pale hand, the texture of pumice. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you,’ he said.

  Jon shook the limb, bid goodbye to the others and left.

  As dawn began tentatively to glow on the horizon, as if peeking into the edge of darkness to ensure that nothing resided there, he tipped Martin over a country bridge into a shallow but swift-flowing river. Ten minutes later, as he turned right at a crossroads a Range Rover turned after him and he cursed to himself. He slowed and let it pass. Its lights disappeared over a hill.

  At eight-thirty, he pulled into the garage. Rickets, hungover and surly, waited with a mug of tea, a copy of the Sun and a rolled cigarette. He looked Jon up and down, the smart, muddy suit, the wide pupils, the shaved head.

  ‘You’re late,’ he complained.

  ‘It couldn’t be helped.’

  He looked at Jon. ‘Nice car.’ He traced the curve of its bonnet with an index finger.

  Jon retrieved a bag from the back seat. ‘Just get on with it,’ he said.

  Rickets looked at him for a second too long, then got on with it. Within minutes there would be new plates, new documents. Later, there would be a new colour, with a new history to match. The vehicle identification number would be altered. It would be meticulously cleaned, then meticulously cleaned again, until there remained no organic trace of human ownership.

  Jon walked to the filthy, tiny toilet. A pornographic calendar hung on the wall. He climbed from the muddy, blood-spattered suit. He changed into the clothes he had stuffed into the bag: jeans, a black t-shirt, a blue cotton shirt, his black overcoat. He filled the bag with the suit, splashed cold water on his face and scrubbed his hands with a tiny sliver of white soap. When he emerged, Rickets stared at him enquiringly. Jon looked unchallengingly back.

  ‘Long night?’ said Rickets.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Jon replied quietly.

  The manner in which Rickets regarded him made him recall a conversation with Cathy. He had asked how Andy was enjoying his job.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘oh, fine. He loves it. He and—what’s his name?—Gibbon seem to be thick as thieves already.’

  ‘And Rickets?’

  Her eyes crinkled introspectively. ‘I’m not so sure about him,’ she admitted. She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear and began absently and gently to tug on the softness of its lobe. ‘He looks at me funny. You know.’

  ‘I don’t like the way he looks at me, sometimes, either,’ said Jon, and Cathy had laughed because she could not have known that he’d meant it, nor that the thought of Rickets—of anybody—looking at her or her child or her husband in an inappropriate manner filled him with revulsion.

  ‘I don’t see the harm in asking,’ said Rickets. ‘I don’t see anything wrong in making conversation.’

  ‘I don’t enjoy conversation,’ he replied.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  Jon held an index finger to his lips and bowed his head, one hand cupping an elbow. He closed his eyes and stood like that for a while. Then he laughed and produced the knife and grabbed Rickets by the scruff of the neck. ‘I’ll fucking tell you about it,’ he said through his teeth, pulling Rickets’s ear close to his mouth. ‘I’ll fucking tell you about it if you like.’

  After a moment he released his grip. Already he was beginning to regret what he had done. He pocketed the knife and he and Rickets faced one another.

  Rickets was breathing quickly but confidently, expelling air through his nostrils. ‘Fuck me,’ he said, a little raggedly. ‘So it has got blood in its veins. Who’d’ve thought?’ A vein pulsed rapidly beneath the thin skin of his temple.

  ‘I’m too tired for this,’ said Jon. He meant it.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Rickets. ‘Long night, right?’

  He regarded Rickets a moment longer before walking from the garage and on to the street. The confrontation did not concern him as much as his reaction to it. There had been similar problems before—where there
were men like Rickets, there would always be similar problems—but they had always been resolved to Jon’s advantage. He might, however, be forced to deny to the Tattooed Man that he had done something as unprofessional as pull a knife. It had, undeniably, been a long night. He did not find lying to the Tattooed Man easy or rewarding, especially if the lie concealed weakness or unnecessary indulgence. Duplicity, however insignificant, squatted like an indigestible knot of matter inside him.

  He stuffed the bag containing the suit into a wheelie bin. It was a winter morning. The air was icy and cars nudged nose to tail on congested roads. It took two hours to walk home. When he arrived, he had no wish to stay there. He had no wish to think. He stayed long enough to inject amphetamines in his arm and sit out the orgasmically intense rush that followed. He ran cold water over his head, spluttering. Although the events of the previous night seemed distant, dreamlike, the morning felt equally unreal, as if he was watching himself. The morning, his breathing, the sound of the passing traffic, had the quality of documentary footage. Intrusively, nakedly normal.

  He went to see Jagger. Although the pubs were yet to open, Jagger was already drunk. Since Jon had seen him last, he had yellowed and shrunk around his bones. Spores of corruption had found root in Jagger’s bowels, wrapped tight about the insides of him. He was dying. He was dead already. Jon followed him into his house. The half-light of curtains across windows and endless hours of solitude and bitterness and silent recrimination. Jagger offered a beer. They drank in silence until lunchtime when, upon unspoken agreement, they left the oppressive stink of cancer, and went on to Fat Dave’s, substituting the stink of sluttishness and corpulence. The three of them played cards and drank cheap sherry. Gambling was joyless and the drunkenness was of the worst kind: the steady-handed, sour-faced inebriation of people for whom there was joy neither in the world nor in escape from it. At seven in the evening they staggered to the pub to spend their winnings from one another on one another in a bitter communion, a malevolent fraternity. The pub was thick and humid with pressed bodies and the residue of breath. Nausea overcame Jon. He walked unsteadily to the lavatory. A thick, yellow stream of urine oozed the length of the urinal. Excrement had dried to concrete on the walls of the cubicles. Jon poured horribly bitter amphetamine sulphate down his throat, then stepped unsteadily to the tiny sink and washed it down with handfuls of water. He stood with his head over the grimy bowl, watching water spiral down the plug. Eventually the trembling began to subside. Waves of cramp passed over his stomach and he dry-retched, knuckles whitening at the edges of the sink. Eventually there came a point when his inebriation subsided. Physically he was still unsteady but his mind sharpened behind the dull pillow of drunkenness. He thought with distant, crystalline clarity, along arbitrary and tangential lines, but each of these paths converged to a vanishing point. The Tattooed Man, naked, wearing faces, the syringe in his hand. The infinite purity of the Oblivion Suite. The Tattooed Man, holding the sweating creases of his own palm to the flame of one of those massive candles, grinning at him with incomprehensible malevolence. ‘Darkness is alien to me, Jon. I’m a creature of infinite illumination. I’m the bringer of light.’