by Neil Cross
Jon splashed water on to his face, rubbed himself damp with a filthy loop of blue cotton which hung from a battered dispenser. There were two drinks waiting for him: a pint of stout, impenetrably black with a white head, and a whisky chaser like a urine sample in chipped glass. He listened to Fat Dave and Jagger and tried not to think, or remember.
Jagger’s wife had left him. This despite the malignancy squeezing the life from him. How she must have hated him. Fat Dave was in trouble with a loan shark. Exponential interest rates whose prodigious fertility he lacked the capacity to understand had grown at the rate of Jagger’s tumour. Fat Dave too feared for his life.
As he listened to them, trying to imagine what it was to be like them, to be inside those heads which were closed to him, a hand fell heavily on his shoulder. He turned his head. At the end of the arm which rested on him with aggressive familiarity was Rickets. He wore jeans and expensive, very new trainers. He smiled wide. ‘All right, Jon? I didn’t know you drank in here.’ His smile indicated that this was a deliberate lie.
‘Now and again,’ said Jon. He glared a warning, but Rickets was drunk and stoned. His eyes were red, bloodshot and unspecific. He was accompanied by a group of perhaps fifteen other young men, kagouls and trainers and baggy denim. Each of them was a stranger to the pub. Jon understood such young men. To enter a strange pub in numbers was, if not a challenge, then at least an indication of aggressive intent. The pub fell silent.
Rickets swayed and grinned. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your mates?’ His teeth seemed very white.
Jon glared into his glass. ‘Not today,’ he said, ‘if you don’t mind.’
Rickets leaned over and spread his hands across the table, lowered his head such that he was able to stare directly into Jon’s eyes. ‘What is it with you?’ he said. ‘Are you a miserable cunt or is it just me you don’t like?’
An intense cone of silence focused on Jon. Fat Dave and Jagger shifted subtly sideways. Rickets’s companions looked on, pint glasses pausing at lips. One or two wore knowing smiles. Jon scowled, seemed to think. He knew what was going to happen. He knew that a man like Rickets was incapable of nurturing a dislike—a jealousy—of the magnitude of that which he nursed for Jon without acting on it some day. He exhaled as he resigned himself. ‘It’s just you,’ he said levelly.
Rickets stood straight and laughed, half-turning to his friends. ‘Did you hear that?’ He made an expansive gesture of disbelief. He picked up a half-full pint glass and brought it down across Jon’s head.
Like all such events, it was quick and savage and prosaic. Jon fell heavily to the floor and with a flurry of kicks Rickets beat him half-unconscious. Jagger and Fat Dave stood, but were held in check by Rickets’s mates, each of whom was evidently eager for escalation, but each of whom, equally, seemed to acknowledge tacitly that at least a nominal excuse was required to embark on such action. Drained of colour, under the weight of too many eyes, Fat Dave and Jagger sank back into their seats and watched.
It was over in half a minute. Jon lay curled on the floor among shards of glass and cigarette butts.
Rickets wiped a hand across his lips and prodded Jon with the toe of a trainer, the pristine white of which was flecked with blood. He swore to himself and spat on the floor. Jon cupped his face and stomach and curled tighter about himself and groaned. Rickets and his entourage left all but immediately. One or two pointedly lagged behind draining their glasses before swaggering towards the door.
The pub had fallen silent and watchful. Fat Dave and Jagger helped Jon to his feet, hands heaving beneath his armpits. His legs hung limp beneath him.
Shirtsleeves rolled to reveal inappropriate, amateur blue tattoos representing the crucifixion, the landlord waddled to their aid.
Bemused and furious, he addressed Fat Dave. ‘What the fuck was all that about?’
Fat Dave looked back at him. ‘I dunno, Ted,’ he said. ‘The black bastard laid into him for nothing.’
The landlord looked at Jon. ‘I’d best call you an ambulance, mate.’
Jon shook his head. A shallow, half-inch gash ran across his temple, oozing the blood which had smeared across his face and neck. His eye was beginning to swell and he suspected, in the oddly logical haze of mild shock that he would be pissing blood for days. ‘I’m all right,’ he said. His voice trembled. ‘I just need to clean myself up a bit.’ He tried to stand unaided and staggered, falling against Jagger.
‘Come through,’ said the landlord, ‘there’s a first-aid kit. Do you want me to phone the police?’
Jon shook his bleary head and allowed the landlord to support him through the pub, behind the bar and into his flat, where he gave Jon a red plastic first-aid box and a half-bottle of whisky. ‘On the house. To steady your nerves.’
‘Thanks,’ said Jon.
The landlord shrugged. ‘Any mate of Fat Dave’s,’ he said. Then, ‘It was obvious they were out for trouble tonight. I had my eye on them. I should have been more careful.’
‘There was nothing you could do,’ said Jon.
‘Fucking black bastard,’ spat the landlord. The four of them passed the whisky round to steady their nerves.
In the bathroom, Jon washed and disinfected the wound across his head. It was not as dramatic as it looked. Then he stripped to the waist and washed his body, which was grazed and bruised and dotted here and there with black spots of caked blood, marking tiny wounds where he had rolled across broken glass. The blood hardly showed on the dark cotton of his shirt. He drained the remnants of the half-bottle of whisky and returned to the pub. He drank for free for the remainder of the evening. The landlord, by way of Matehood, guilt and gratitude that there was no police involvement, allowed the first few pints on the house. The remainder were supplied by Dave and Jagger.
Jagger: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. Everything’s fucked up. Everything’s fucked. Everything’s gone wrong.’
Jon could not bring himself to speak.
They left the otherwise empty pub at midnight. The landlord bolted the door behind them, and they staggered unsteadily in the direction of Fat Dave’s squalid flat, by way of the Taj Mahal take-away. Still incensed and impotent, Fat Dave called the man who served them a fucking Paki monkey. It occurred to Jon for the first time that Dave was eaten with self-loathing, that he woke every morning or afternoon hungover and filthy with a dull throb of misery in his guts and only himself to blame.
They sat cross-legged upon Dave’s bitty and malodorous carpet, faded and worn, and drank tins of super-strength lager and ate vindaloo curry and yellow rice. Jagger talked for the first time of his cancer, Dave of his financial tribulations. There was an exhausted despair in everything that was said. There were things they had wanted to be which they had never been, things they had done they wished they had not.
Jon began to doze, warmed by the unfamiliar intimacy and rhythm of their voices. He had loathed these men. Now he was lulled as, in the face of their extinction, they spoke to one another with something not unakin to tenderness. As Jon slipped from consciousness, he was aware of Jagger tucking a blanket about him and slipping a stained and coverless pillow beneath his head. He was unable to speak. He wanted to say that he understood and forgave them both, but could not.
He woke bathed in dishwater daylight, the glow of impossibly distant, exploding hydrogen filtered through a gap in the rotting curtains. Letting light in.
Fat Dave and Jagger were unconscious and snoring, one on the sofa, the other flat on the carpet, both with forearms crossed against their eyelids. He looked at them with something like pity as he stood, then stumbled unsteadily to the bathroom. He bolted the door and leaned against the peeling wall, shaking and groaning. He kneeled before the filthy toilet and hacked and strained until he vomited a bitter yellow-green liquid that dangled like an umbilicus of egg yolk between his lips and the water. He waited until the shivering had passed. The dressing was crusty brown. His eye was swollen and purple. His mouth felt fetid and his cl
othes were rumpled. He knew he smelled of cigarettes, of alcohol, of Fat Dave’s filth and Jagger’s cancer. He loosened his jeans, which fell about his ankles as he squatted on the toilet, his face buried in his hands. After interminable peristaltic waves of agony, he passed a thin, malodorous diarrhoea. Squirt groan. Squirt groan. His piss was thick and yellowy orange, like half-set jelly. It reeked. He retched and puked more thick bile into the avocado bath.
There were perhaps four grammes of speed left in the small plastic bag in his pocket. He wrapped some into a square of toilet tissue which he dry-swallowed like a pill. He could find no toothpaste. He splashed his face with cold water. Another wave of cramps passed across his guts, and again he dropped his trousers and passed burning liquid shit, biting his lip against crying out in pain. When the attack had passed, he tiptoed into the front room, arranging his belt and flies, and retrieved his jacket from the floor. Quietly he left the flat. Outside the speed began to take effect. He shuddered with borrowed energy, beneath which he could feel his body protesting. He needed rest, he needed to eat. He needed to soak in hot, soapy water. He needed to sit across the kitchen table from the Tattooed Man as Phil read a tabloid in the corner and talk to them about cricket, or that day’s leader column in the Daily Telegraph. He needed to retrieve some normality. He needed the thought of that cottage and that gathering of men, the memory of Rickets kicking him to the floor, the inexplicable tenderness he had felt towards Jagger and Fat Dave, to be assimilated in memory, where everything could be contextualised and understood. While he shivered with a combination of the hangover, the speed he had taken to eradicate it and the exhaustion of the body from which he felt so distant, these things remained part of the present.
The winter sunlight hurt his eyes. He had speed-freak eyes: wide pupils, pools of blackness that allowed in too much light, more light than he needed to see by. Details were crisp and immediate and the world dizzying with signs whose meanings and relationships were supernaturally clear. He knew that if people were staring at him, if heads turned in cars as they passed, if people looked over their shoulders at him, if people spoke about him in hushed whispers, it was because he reeked of alcohol and sweat and puke and shit, because the filthy dressing on his head marked him out as something peculiar and threatening. It was not because everyone sensed what he was, and what he had done. Yet the urgent eruption of a siren nearly caused him to lose control of his bowels. He found himself avoiding people’s gaze with a transparent desperation.
He stopped in a café to drink a cup of coffee and smoke a cigarette, but the weight of all the eyes, of all that perceived insight, was too great. He staggered into the street and walked from nowhere to nowhere, ricocheting from lamp-posts, moving aggressively onwards. He looked at himself reflected in a department store window, the hollows of his eyes in juxtaposition with the smiling mannequins within, modelling ski-gear and winter coats. People swerved to avoid him. He looked at their reflection behind his own, two layers of perception reflected in the unreal window of commerce.
He remembered the favour he had asked of his friend. Something within him warmed. It was a long time before a taxi would stop for him.
Cathy’s first reaction upon seeing him was a bright smile. Then her face fell. The toddler, Kirsty, stood behind her, in cotton vest and knickers, a doll dangling from her sticky fist. ‘My God,’ said Cathy, ‘what happened to you?’
Jon stumbled over his words, shivered. Found himself unable to speak.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Come on in, for Christ’s sake.’
He followed her into the living room. She set Kirsty down in her chair, and faced him, hands on hips. She was wearing a long white T-shirt and black leggings, hair pulled into a casual ponytail. She smelled of soap and shampoo and Johnson’s baby talc. She lit a cigarette and sat, crossing her legs and arms, holding the cigarette centimetres from her mouth, speaking from behind it. ‘Sit down before you fall down.’
He was loath to sit: his filthiness made him an alien thing in this place. As he sank into the chair, his clothes pressed into him and his flesh crawled at their touch. He was shaking.
Her brow was knitted: ‘What the bloody hell happened to you?’
He buried his head in his hands. ‘I’m sorry I came.’
She spat the words with genuine contempt. ‘Don’t be an idiot. You look ill. You look like death.’
He smiled with some bitterness and not a little irony.
‘Who did that to you?’ She reached out as if to touch his brow. Her hand hung in the air between them, its eventual trajectory undecided. She withdrew it.
He touched his forehead, winced. ‘Just some idiot in a pub.’
‘You look like you haven’t slept for a week.’ Decisively, she stood and held out her hand. It was a peculiarly maternal gesture: a command to come along this instant. He surrendered his hand. She took it and pulled him to his feet, leading him upstairs. On the landing, she said, ‘Men,’ with a kind of disgust born of familiarity, ‘I swear you don’t know how to look after yourselves.’ She showed him through to the bathroom and bent over the bath to run the taps. Steam began to rise. ‘Take those filthy clothes off,’ she said.
She softened at his reaction and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll turn my back.’ She did just that and, selfconsciously he stripped, handing over his jeans and shirt and t-shirt. He stood absurd in his socks and pants. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘have a long soak. It’ll take an hour or two to wash and dry these things. There’s plenty of hot water. Then we’ll make you a decent breakfast. When did you last eat?’
He didn’t know.
She tutted and left the bathroom. Jon removed his socks and underpants and held them in one hand, looking around for somewhere to put them. Nowhere seemed particularly appropriate so he dropped them to the floor. The door opened a crack and he immediately kicked them behind him with his heel. Cathy’s hand poked through the crack, holding a blue towelling dressing-gown. She dropped it to the floor without saying a word and closed the door again.
He slid into the bath when it was still only half full and running, the water painfully hot, making his flesh pink, heating even the chill of his bones. He exhaled half in pain, half in relief. He lay there and listened to his heart and the sounds of the washing machine as it ran through its cycle. When the bath cooled he let in more hot water. He dipped his head beneath the surface, the heat threatening to suffocate rather than drown him, then thoroughly soaped his body, washing away the recent past. He lay in a half-doze, the delicate fluttering of arteries beneath his skin like fronds shifting in a tiny tide. At last he stood, dripping, and tenderly began to towel himself dry.
As he stood there, Cathy walked in. She carried his jeans and T-shirt folded in her arms. He could smell that they were freshly laundered. She dropped them and put her hand to her mouth and said, ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, I didn’t think.’ But Jon knew, or felt he knew, that this was not so, that, if she had not actually intended this to happen, then it was the thought of doing it which had distracted her to the extent that it became possible. He knew also that seduction was not her intent but something else, something immediate but inarticulable, as if bursting in on his nudity was a way to establish an intimacy. He knew that she would spin on her heel before the words had died in her mouth and slam the door behind her, and they would giggle about it over breakfast and be friends. In a tenth of a second all this passed his mind. But in the expected act of turning away she paused, as if registering what she had seen, and turned slowly to face him, pushing the door quietly closed. She shook her head and said, ‘My God, look at you.’ He dropped the towel and hung his head as she stared at him. She reached out a trembling hand and with the tip of a tentative finger traced the length of white scar tissue that ran across his ribs, across his chest. His body was a lace of scars, a brutal tattoo of his violence. She ran her fingers along the white relief of the stab wounds that crossed his stomach, then the indelible record of a gash that ran from hip to knee, a hairless trace
across his thigh. She walked behind him and, her breath rapid and warm against his nape, traced the wounds that dotted his shoulders and crissed and crossed his spine. He shook with something like shock when, with excruciating tenderness, she wrapped her arms about him from behind, her breasts pressed flat to him, and kissed him at the base of his neck. She turned him and nursed his head, whispering, ‘My God. Look at you. Look at you,’ over and over. He heard with a knot in his stomach that she wept for him. He held her at arm’s length. She leaned forward and pecked him on the lips, touching his face. He had not been touched for so very long.
She turned and left the bathroom without speaking. When she returned, only seconds later, announcing her arrival this time with a rap on the door, it was like a different world. He had pulled on his jeans by then, and she walked in carrying a pair of socks and a shirt. ‘These are Andy’s,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure he won’t mind if you don’t. I hope the shirt fits: I’ll never get the blood out of the other one.’
